1170157 - Consider using protobuf for message serialization

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox Graveyard :: Shumway, defect)

Description

[Till Schneidereit [:till]]

We currently use hand-crafted (de)serialization code for the message passing between the player and IO parts of Shumway. This is suboptimal for robustness and probably also for performance (i.e., we have lots of unaligned accesses).

Google's protobuf is probably about as good as it gets for object serialization, and there's a fast JS implementation available:
https://github.com/mafintosh/protocol-buffers

One issue: we sometimes do inline (de-)serialization right when data is created or used. Most prominently, shape data is stored in serialized form and directly converted into Path2D objects. I'm not sure if it's possible to inline the (de-)serializers like that.