Serialization: making it fast, concise, cross-platform

This talk is about different approaches to serialization, as well as the way we created a cross-platform serialization engine for Apache Ignite. Serialization is one of the crucial parts of any distributed system. Some value performance, some — convenience, yet for someone cross-platform is of more importance. Some prefer to have it all. We will dwell on how we created a serialization engine for Apache Ignite, which was supposed to reasonably combine all of the characteristics listed above, along with ability to read the fields of a serialized object without deserialization. In this talk we'll cover different principles of data types serialization, ways of working with classes metadata, cross-platform and code generation issues.