[stochastic_monk]

I’m familiar with capnproto [0], which claims something like zero overhead.

Personally, I just write serialization functions using fwrite/fread/write/read, but I’ve used projects which depend on it.

[0] https://capnproto.org/

[CyberDildonics]

I've done that, but it can be very error prone and therefore time consuming.

Instead of relying on serialization of existing data structures I actually try to use more general data structures that already exist in a single span of memory.

Then serialization is just a matter of writing them out from start to finish, or allocating them in a memory mapped file.