Serialization

We use the bitcode library to serialize and deserialize messages. Bitcode is a very compact serialization format that uses bit-packing (a bool will be serialized as a single bit).

When sending messages, we start by serializing the message early into a Bytes structure.

This allows us to:

• know the size of the message right away (which helps with packet fragmentation)
• cheaply copy the message if we need to send it multiple times (for reliable channels) However:
• it is much more expensive and inefficient to call serialize on each individual message compared with the final packet, and the serialized bytes compress less efficiently

Buffers

We use a Buffer to serialize/deserialize messages in order to re-use memory allocations.

When we receive a packet (&[u8]), we create a ReadBuffer from it, which starts by copying the bytes into the buffer.