NAME Sereal - Fast, compact, powerful binary (de-)serialization SYNOPSIS use Sereal qw(encode_sereal decode_sereal looks_like_sereal); DESCRIPTION This is an experimental module. Before using it in production, please get in touch with the authors! *Sereal* is an efficient, compact-output, binary and feature-rich serialization protocol. The Perl encoder is implemented as the Sereal::Encoder module, the Perl decoder correspondingly as Sereal::Decoder. They are distributed separately to allow for safe upgrading without downtime. (Hint: Upgrade the decoder everywhere first, then the encoder.) This "Sereal" module is a very thin wrapper around both "Sereal::Encoder" and "Sereal::Decoder". It depends on both and loads both. So if you have a user of both encoder and decoder, it is enough to depend on a particular version of "Sereal" and you'll get the most recent released versions of "Sereal::Encoder" and "Sereal::Decoder" whose version is smaller than or equal to the version of "Sereal" you depend on. The protocol specification and many other bits of documentation can be found in the github repository. Right now, the specification is at <https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/blob/master/sereal_spec.pod>, there is a discussion of the design objectives in <https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/blob/master/README.pod>, and the output of our benchmarks can be seen at <https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/wiki/Sereal-Comparison-Graphs>. EXPORTED FUNCTIONS It is recommended to use the object-oriented interface of "Sereal::Encoder" and "Sereal::Decoder" if you care about performance. You can optionally import three functions from "Sereal". "encode_sereal" is the same function as Sereal::Encoder's "encode_sereal" function. "decode_sereal" and "looks_like_sereal" are the same as Sereal::Decoder's functions of the same names. After loading the "Sereal" module, both "Sereal::Encoder" and "Sereal::Decoder" are guaranteed to be loaded, so you can use their object-oriented interface. AUTHOR Steffen Mueller <smueller@cpan.org> ACKNOWLEDGMENT This module was originally developed for Booking.com. With approval from Booking.com, this module was generalized and published on CPAN, for which the authors would like to express their gratitude. COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE Copyright (C) 2012, 2013 by Steffen Mueller