Comment 1 for bug 1031954

I benchmarked some alternatives:
https://gist.github.com/859ba4995a3df9f45913#file_report_2.7.markdown

Personally, I prefer the msgpack implementation which serializes the array.array data as a string. It deserializes much faster than when serialized as a list, is just as architecture-dependent as Python 2.6 rings were, and is simpler than the "custom" code. The only downside I can see would be an added dependency on msgpack-python for Swift.