sml-pickle

Standard ML package for serialising and deserialising data structures.

Overview of MLB files

• lib/github.com/diku-dk/sml-random/pickle.mlb:

  • signature BITSTREAM

  • structure Bitstream :> BITSTREAM

  • structure Bytestream :> BITSTREAM

  • signature PICKLE

  • functor Pickle (S : BITSTREAM) : PICKLE

  • structure Pickle :> PICKLE (uses Bytestream)

Use Bitstream to generate the most concise pickles and Bytestream for the fastest implementation. The Pickle structure is the result of applying the Pickle functor to the Bytestream structure.

Use of the package

This library is set up to work well with the SML package manager smlpkg. To use the package, in the root of your project directory, execute the command:

$ smlpkg add github.com/diku-dk/sml-pickle

This command will add a requirement (a line) to the sml.pkg file in your project directory (and create the file, if there is no file sml.pkg already).

To download the library into the directory lib/github.com/diku-dk/sml-pickle, execute the command:

$ smlpkg sync

You can now reference the mlb-file using relative paths from within your project's mlb-files.

Notice that you can choose either to treat the downloaded package as part of your own project sources (vendoring) or you can add the sml.pkg file to your project sources and make the smlpkg sync command part of your build process.

Implementation details

The implementation is based on the paper:

• Martin Elsman. Type-Specialized Serialization with Sharing. In Sixth Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming (TFP ‘05). Tallinn, Estonia. September 2005. pdf.