Sereal-alike serialization at JSON functionality

[tsee]

Hi Stevan,

I understand that you're working on this for learning and prototyping. However, I've actually seriously considered writing a JSON-subset-of-sereal-functionality kind of encoder/decoder in the past that uses the same tricks as Sereal for performance. In fact, such a thing could conceivably be a bit speedier than Sereal itself because it wouldn't have to do as much book keeping*. It could use the same structure that Sereal uses or invent a different set of tags. With less functionality, one could achieve greater compactness by packing more information (more lengths, etc) into the tag byte. Of course, for that to be useful, it'd have to be written in C. Also, there's already MessagePack and BSON. While those might be a tad less efficient than Sereal (and thus a JSON-Sereal subset would likely win by a little bit), they're at least established and aren't "NIH".

--Steffen

• Something that requires a few cycles in Sereal::Encoder is actually... keeping track of cycles. If one would simply ignore the potential presence of cyclical references, that would likely be a cute speed win.

[stevan]

Yeah, this whole repo is mostly just for learning and the "JSON-subset-of-Sereal" is mostly cause I didn't want to deal with the weirder bits of Sereal (weakrefs, scalar refs, etc.) and have it cloud my learning.

But that said, who knows, it wouldn't be the first time something I hacked together for lolz became a useful tool :)