MaObjectSerializer
Last updated at 9:22 am UTC on 3 April 2017
Belongs to Ma-Serializer-Core-API.
A MaObjectSerializer serializes any object into a bytes and back. Transforming an object into bytes is useful for storing it on disk or sending it over the network.
A primary feature of this serializer is that it stores in a first-class buffer format. There is a hierarchy of buffers for storing the various kinds of objects: named inst-vars, indexed-vars, named + indexed, bytes, words, and a special one for CompiledMethods and MethodContexts.
First-class buffers allows object graphs to be "walked" similarly to the way the standard Smalltalk object-model is walked.