and often performance as well

BS. Nothing can be faster than a read()/write() (or even mmap()) into a struct, because everything else would need to do more work.

▲

pjc50 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, if your structure doesn't contain any pointers and you only ever want to support one endianness and you trust your compiler to fix the machine layout of the struct forever.

	▲	zadikian 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Mainly the first thing. If your struct is already serial, of course serialization will be easy.
	▲	userbinator 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		...which is true for 99.999% of the time anyway, so it's not worth worrying about.