*Sereal* is an efficient, compact-output, binary and feature-rich
serialization protocol. The Perl encoder is implemented as the
the Sereal::Encoder manpage module, the Perl decoder correspondingly as
the Sereal::Decoder manpage. 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/ser…,
there is a discussion of the design objectives in
https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/blob/master/REA…, and the output
of our benchmarks can be seen at
https://github.com/Sereal/Sereal/wiki/Sereal-Com….

• Igor Vlasenko

• perl-Sereal