ZeroC.Slice 0.4.0

The Slice serialization library

Slice is a serialization format for structured data: it allows you to encode structured data into streams of bytes and later decode these bytes to recreate the structured data.

Slice is also a modern Interface Definition Language (IDL): you define your structured data with the Slice IDL and then use the Slice compiler to generate code that encodes/decodes this structured data to/from bytes in Slice format.

In C#, the Slice compiler for C# generates code that relies on this Slice serialization library.

Unlike older C# libraries, Slice relies on System.Buffers (IBufferWriter<byte>, ReadOnlySequence<byte>) and is typically used with the Pipelines library.

Package | Source code | Documentation | API reference

Sample Code

// Slice definition

struct Person {
    name: string
    id: int32
    tag(1) email: string?
}

// Generated by the Slice compiler for C#

public partial record struct Person
{
    public string Name;

    public int Id;

    public string? Email;

    /// <summary>Constructs a new instance of <see cref="Person" />.</summary>
    public Person(string name, int id, string? email)
    {
        this.Name = name;
        ...
    }

    /// <summary>Constructs a new instance of <see cref="Person" /> and decodes its fields
    /// from a Slice decoder.</summary>
    /// <param name="decoder">The Slice decoder.</param>
    public Person(ref SliceDecoder decoder)
    {
        this.Name = decoder.DecodeString();
        ...
    }

    /// <summary>Encodes the fields of this struct with a Slice encoder.</summary>
    /// <param name="encoder">The Slice encoder.</param>
    public readonly void Encode(ref SliceEncoder encoder)
    {
        encoder.EncodeString(this.Name);
        ...
    }
}