My question is why focus on serialization performance. What combination of server hardware and network set-up makes serialization ever turn up in the top 20 on a full application profile?

Quote:Does anyone think the average IT budget will keep up with inflation over the next few years?

In performance? Absolutely! At fixed prices, the number of cores as well as memory throughput will double every 2-3 years at least. (Note that the clock frequency per core used to do that, but hasn't for quite some time now)

However, all I've seen from corporate IT is moving (or, rather, has moved) to managed frameworks; either Java EE or .NET. And the big movement now is to outsource corporate applications entirely, using SaaS platforms like salesforce.com, Google Apps or Microsoft Azure. Before that, there were lots of large enterprise frameworks that did the same thing, but without the outsourcing part, such as BAE, IBM etc.

A typical enterprise IT application worries a whole lot about things like service busses, (high-level) message queues etc. Low-level serialization in C++ doesn't even enter into the equation! The people I do worry about those kinds of things are either network infrastructure people (Cisco, Juniper, etc), or real-time applications people (mostly your game developers or embedded systems developers). For the former, compliance with and adherence to standards is critically important, and thus they'll use some serialization mechanism that's engineered explicitly for the standard in question. For the latter, most of them want to focus on where they will get the big speed-up, and network serialization throughput isn't it -- if serialization takes more than 1% of your application runtime, you're doing something entirely wrong, and if you can remove ALL of 1% of your application runtime, then you have sped up your application by not much. Amdahl's law and all that.

I understand that you like your serialization solution, and you want others to like it and use it as much as you do. However, personally, I don't see the value. I'm not the entire world, though, so if some other user out there is using it for something real, I'll certainly welcome feedback and discussion.