I was doing some comparison between BinaryFormatter and protobuf-net serializer and was quite pleased with what I found, but what was strange is that protobuf-net managed to serialize the objects into a smaller byte array than what I would get if I just wrote the value of every property into an array of bytes without any metadata.
I know protobuf-net supports string interning if you set AsReference to true, but I'm not doing that in this case, so does protobuf-net provide some compression by default?
Here's some code you can run to see for yourself:
var simpleObject = new SimpleObject
{
Id = 10,
Name = "Yan",
Address = "Planet Earth",
Scores = Enumerable.Range(1, 10).ToList()
};
using (var memStream = new MemoryStream())
{
var binaryWriter = new BinaryWriter(memStream);
// 4 bytes for int
binaryWriter.Write(simpleObject.Id);
// 3 bytes + 1 more for string termination
binaryWriter.Write(simpleObject.Name);
// 12 bytes + 1 more for string termination
binaryWriter.Write(simpleObject.Address);
// 40 bytes for 10 ints
simpleObject.Scores.ForEach(binaryWriter.Write);
// 61 bytes, which is what I expect
Console.WriteLine("BinaryWriter wrote [{0}] bytes",
memStream.ToArray().Count());
}
using (var memStream = new MemoryStream())
{
ProtoBuf.Serializer.Serialize(memStream, simpleObject);
// 41 bytes!
Console.WriteLine("Protobuf serialize wrote [{0}] bytes",
memStream.ToArray().Count());
}
EDIT: forgot to add, the SimpleObject class looks like this:
[Serializable]
[DataContract]
public class SimpleObject
{
[DataMember(Order = 1)]
public int Id { get; set; }
[DataMember(Order = 2)]
public string Name { get; set; }
[DataMember(Order = 3)]
public string Address { get; set; }
[DataMember(Order = 4)]
public List<int> Scores { get; set; }
}