theproadam / Serializer

C# Marshal Serializer Wrapper

Serializer

Fast and Small Serializer Wrapper for C# using Marshal

This is just a simple wrapper code that allows conversion from a struct to byte array. It has no overhead, however it does come with array size limitations.

Without any summaries or try/catch/finally blocks, the code simplifies to this:

public static class Serializer
{
    public static byte[] Serialize(object InputObject)
    {
        byte[] outputArray = new byte[Marshal.SizeOf(InputObject)];
        GCHandle handle = GCHandle.Alloc(outputArray, GCHandleType.Pinned);
        Marshal.StructureToPtr(InputObject, handle.AddrOfPinnedObject(), false);

        handle.Free();
        return outputArray;
    }

    public static T Deserialize<T>(byte[] InputBytes) where T : struct
    {
        if (Marshal.SizeOf(default(T)) != InputBytes.Length) throw new Exception();

        GCHandle handle = GCHandle.Alloc(InputBytes, GCHandleType.Pinned);
        T value = (T)Marshal.PtrToStructure(handle.AddrOfPinnedObject(), typeof(T));

        handle.Free();
        return value;
    }
}

Benchmark

The included LittleSerializer project demonstrates the speed and size advantage compared to regular serialization.
Tested with a 100 byte struct, serialization (Fixed Buffer Sizes), Test ran outside VS, Release mode:

Method	Output Size (bytes)	Serialization Time (ms)	Deserialization Time (ms)
Marshal-Serializer	100	0.1548	0.222
Default-Serializer	517	0.6545	0.576

Note the 5X smaller file size that the Marshal Serializer produces.

Notes

Make sure you include the proper [MarshalAs(..., ...)] lines to ensure no exception will be thrown.