Implementing custom serialization protocols for inter-process communication in C++

19 Sep 2023

Serialization

In the world of inter-process communication (IPC), serialization plays a vital role in transmitting data between different processes or systems. Serialization is the process of converting complex data structures into a format that can be easily transmitted or stored. While many programming languages provide built-in serialization mechanisms, sometimes it becomes necessary to implement custom serialization protocols to meet specific requirements.

In this blog post, we will explore how to implement custom serialization protocols for inter-process communication in C++. We will discuss the key concepts involved and provide an example code snippet to illustrate the implementation.

Understanding Serialization

Before diving into custom serialization protocols, let’s have a brief overview of serialization in general. Serialization is the process of converting an object or data structure into a linear stream of bytes, which can be transmitted or stored easily.

There are two primary requirements for serialization:

Encoding: Representing the data structure in a compact and platform-independent format.
Decoding: Reconstructing the original data structure from the serialized byte stream.

Custom Serialization Protocols

Custom serialization protocols are designed when the standard serialization mechanisms provided by the programming language or libraries are insufficient or inadequate for specific requirements. Custom protocols allow us to control the details of how the data is encoded and decoded, and also optimize the size and performance of serialization.

When implementing a custom serialization protocol, you should consider the following aspects:

Data representation: Decide how to represent the data structure in the serialized form. This can include the order of fields, handling data types, and managing complex nesting.
Byte encoding: Determine how each data type will be encoded into bytes, and how the bytes will be combined to represent the entire data structure.
Serialization APIs: Provide functions or classes to serialize and deserialize the data structure using the chosen protocol.

Example Code

Let’s take a simple example of a Person class that contains details like name, age, and address. Here’s how we can implement a custom serialization protocol for this class in C++:

class Person {
    std::string name;
    int age;
    std::string address;

public:
    // Constructor

    // Getters and Setters

    // Custom serialization functions
    std::string serialize() const {
        std::ostringstream oss;
        oss << name << "," << age << "," << address;
        return oss.str();
    }

    void deserialize(const std::string& data) {
        std::istringstream iss(data);
        std::getline(iss, name, ',');
        std::getline(iss, age, ',');
        std::getline(iss, address, ',');
    }
};

In the above code snippet, we have added custom serialize() and deserialize() functions to the Person class. These functions encode the Person object into a string representation, and decode the string representation back into the object, respectively.

Conclusion

Implementing custom serialization protocols is often necessary when the standard serialization mechanisms provided by programming languages are not sufficient for specific requirements. By designing and implementing custom protocols, you can have more control over data representation, byte encoding, and serialization APIs.

In this blog post, we explored the concept of custom serialization protocols for inter-process communication in C++. We discussed the fundamental aspects of serialization and provided an example code snippet to demonstrate how to implement custom serialization for a simple Person class.

#C++ #Serialization