marshal.md

ipc.marshal

local m = ipc.marshal(obj[, upval, size, size_increment])

The ipc.marshal constructor serializes a Lua object (obj above). It returns an ipc.marshal instance (m above). The resulting m instance provides a simple :read method for deserializing the object:

local obj = m:read()

When upval is true, the serialized obj can contain upvalues/closures (default is false) The size and size_increment are used to incrementally grow the write buffer (see ipc.workqueue).

Example

More concretely, suppose we want to serialize the following table:

local obj = {1,2,3,v=4,g=5}

We can marshal (that is, serialize) the data into m

local m = ipc.marshal(obj)

Contrary to normal serialization, m is not a string, but a userdata object. The most useful thing about m is that if can be read multiple times (like a string):

local obj2 = m:read()
local obj3 = m:read()

This is useful when you want to serialize something only once (say, in the main thread), and unserialize it many times (say, in worker threads).