Packer: fast strict serialization in haskell

Packer is originally an experiment when benchmarking other serialization solution, namely cereal and binary. It turns out that the experiment yields interesting result performance-wise, and also allowed different use cases.

Packer provides a way to de-serialize and serialize data, from/to bytestring. The usage is very similar to binary and cereal runPut/runGet, except that it doesn't allow incremental feeding.

Holes

The interface allows to create holes during the packing; this is useful to have a more C like API where some fields are computed a-posteriori:

putF = do
    crc32  <- putHoleWord32LE
    crcVal <- foldM (\acc w -> putWord32LE w >> addCRC acc w) 0 [1,2,3]
    fillHole crc32 crcVal