Feature request: State serialisation/deserialisation

[DavidBuchanan314]

For most concrete implementations (e.g. in tamatool https://github.com/jcrona/tamatool/blob/master/src/state.c ), there exists a need to serialise the state to an array of bytes, so that it may be saved in non-volatile storage etc.

IMHO this logic should be contained within tamalib itself, along with functions vaguely like

#define SERIALISED_STATE_SIZE [something]

void get_serialised_state(uint8_t *buf);
void set_serialised_state(uint8_t *buf);

[ericlewis]

While I agree it would be handy, it is not quite a universal function. If the buffer is larger than the memory + the rom or whatever in RAM, you will crash. The Arduino one already suffers from memory pressure & the way it is implemented in tamatool has a whole different level of abstractions over the file system which aren't easily replicated. It sucks to replicate but there are not too many options given the constraints of the platforms.

[DavidBuchanan314]

It could be done with ~0 memory, using a streaming API, e.g.

void get_serialised_state(void (*callback_that_writes_one_byte)(uint8_t));
void set_serialised_state(uint8_t (*callback_that_reads_one_byte)(void));

(please excuse my possibly incorrect C function pointer syntax...)

This API should be sufficient to implement something like writing to an EEPROM on a resource-constrained Arduino, but also work nicely for implementations like tamatool.