[Question] Are serializations portable to other machines?

[Bouloulou1138]

Hello,

I have a question and I cannot find somewhere the answer.

Cereal performs binary serialization, which sounds to me that it serializes the primitive types as they are in memory.

So for example, when a float is serialized, the bytes written will represent the float with the standard that the hardware uses, like IEEE 754. This means that the bytestring cannot be loaded by another machine that uses some other standard and not IEEE 754.

Is my understanding correct?

[elliottt]

If you use the Serialize class interface, the data will be portable as it's consistently serialized as big endian data. If you write custom serializers using the Get and Put modules, it's up to you to ensure that you're producing portable serializations.

[Bouloulou1138]

That's great! Thank you for your prompt response.