title: C++ Serialization Performance
body: <p>I'm building a distributed C++ application that needs to do lots of serialization and deserialization of simple data structures that's being passed between different processes and computers.</p>
  
  <p>I'm not interested in serializing complex class hierarchies, but more of sending structures with a few simple members such as number, strings and data vectors. The data vectors can often be many megabytes large.
  I'm worried that text/xml-based ways of doing it is too slow and I really don't want to write this myself since problems like string encoding and number endianess can make it way more complicated than it looks on the surface.</p>
  
  <p>I've been looking a bit at protocol buffers and boost.serialize. According to the documents protocol buffers seems to care much about performance.
  Boost seems somewhat more lightweight in the sense that you don't have an external language for specifying the data format which I find quite convenient for this particular project.</p>
  
  <p>So my question comes down to this: does anyone know if the boost serialization is fast for the typical use case I described above?</p>
  
  <p>Also if there are other libraries that might be right for this, I'd be happy to hear about them.</p>