ESUG SummerTalk - Fuel, binary object serializer

Hi folks. I am really happy to announce that ESUG is sponsoring me for Fuel development through the ESUG SummerTalk. I am Martin Dias, a student at Buenos Aires, Argentina. The idea behind this SummerTalk is to implement Fuel, a binary, fast and general-purpose object graph serializer in Pharo. It is based on VisualWorks' Parcels ideas.

Actually, the project has already started since several months. Tristan Bourgois and I started with the project while doing an internship with RMoD, INRIA. Since a couple of months, Mariano Martinez Peck joined the team, and now he is the official mentor in the SummerTalk.

ESUG website for SummertTalk: http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Promotion/SummerTalk/SummerTalk2011

The website with all the necessary information is here: http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/web/pier/software/Fuel
It even includes slides explaining the algorithm. In addition, a paper is in progress.

For the moment, Fuel already provides the following features:

- Fast pickle format. It is much faster to materialize than to serialize.
- Correctly support class reshape (when the class of serialized objects has changed).
- Serialize ANY kind of object. For the moment there is no object to our knowledge that we cannot serialize and materialize.
- Be able to completely serialize classes and traits (not just a global name).
- Support cycles and avoid duplicates in the graph.
- Integration to Moose with an extension to export and import their models.
- Detection of globals: for example if you serialize Transcript, it is not duplicated and instead managed as a global reference.
- Solve common problems like Set rehash.
- Buffered writing: we use a buffered write stream for the serialization part (thanks Sven!).
- No need of special support from the VM.
- Try to have a good object oriented design.
- Well tested (about 120 tests, for the moment).
- Large set of benchmarks (even benchmarks for Moose extension).

And of course, there are a lot features for the future. You can see some of them in the website and some in the issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/fuel/issues/list

We really appreciate all kind of feedback and comments. If you want to try it, check in the website how to do it. It is extremely easy.

Once again, I want to thank a lot to ESUG for sponsoring the project. I plan to create a "news" section in the website with some RSS. I will keep you informed.

Best regards,
Martin