Faster/more efficient alternatives to Ruby's Marshal?

Question

I'm looking for a drop-in replacement of Ruby's Marshal capability, which hopefully has one or more of the following advantages over Marshal:

• faster serialization/deserialization
• more concise (or simply smaller) object-graph

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Msgpack is focused on all of that. To replace Marshal:

require 'msgpack'

module Marshal
  module_function
  def dump(x)
    x.to_msgpack
  end
  def load(x)
    MessagePack.unpack x
  end
  alias restore load
end

http://msgpack.sourceforge.net/