Comment 8 for bug 1031954

David,
The value that msgpack brings is apparent if you compare the two pairs of msgpack-based (de)serialization routines in my gist with the "custom" encoder/decoder. The msgpack-based implementations are only a few lines of simple code each, one of them is just as fast as a more complicated/rigid custom implementation, and the msgpack (de)serialization code is robust to changing underlying data (in contrast with the "custom" implementation).

BTW, I think if you deserialize the array.array data by reading each entry as an unsigned short and sticking it into the new array.array, you'll have performance on par with the slower msgpack-based solution (~10x worse than the one which maintains the array.array data as it sits in memory but still *way* faster than Python 2.7's pickle.load). I think you have to dump the data with .tostring() and load it using that (which works fine through the constructor).

I'll cook up a hybrid JSON/custom encoder/decoder, see how it looks and performs, and update the gist.