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[gvx]

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[WhyNotDogie]

i like this library, but bitser is uhm... not a dutch word. at least, ive never heard it in my many years in holland

[gvx]

I'm happy that you like it! "Bitser" is the comparative (vergrotende trap) of "bits", which means abrupt, snappy, unfriendly.

https://www.vandale.nl/gratis-woordenboek/nederlands/betekenis/bitser

[masakk1]

I'm a little late to the party, but I would like to get some tutorials regarding class registration.
For example, I was wondering if I could use it to make my packet size smaller, but binser is so dead that not even their examples work.

Here is my idea:

--#region Packet types
---Every type of packet.
---@class PKT_TYPE
PKT_TYPE = {
	CONNECT = {
		REQUEST = 11,
		ACCEPT = 12,
	},
}

-- templates of how different packets would look
PKT_TEMPLATE = {}
PKT_TEMPLATE.CLIENT = {
	"type",
	"clientID",
	data = {},
}
PKT_TEMPLATE.SERVER = {
	"type",
	data = {},
}
--#endregion
-- Then it'd be great if I could "register" these tables 
bitser.register("ClientBasePacket", PKT_TEMPLATE.CLIENT)

-- then, creating a packet from a client
function createClientPacket(type, data)
    local pkt = {
        type = type,
        data = data or nil,
    }
    local serialised = biter.dumpclass("ClientBasePacket", pkt)
    return serialised
end

This obviously doesn't work right now, but it's how I think should work. I don't have any documentation to check for how to do it, and bitser changes a few things from binser, and even binser's documentation is sparse or just wrong.

I could also explore the idea of static byte lengths for the payload's headers, but I haven't gotten explored that yet, for now.

[masakk1]

I wouldn't mind writing documentation for it. Once I understood it, of course.

[gvx]

There is a tentative implementation of something like this in the examples directory -- it doesn't support templates with nested tables yet for example.

It does not work on plain tables like in your example, however, and I have no intention of making this work, because this would mean that you couldn't e.g. serialize a sequence of packets, you'd need to preprocess each of them individually, and at that point you may just as well just do something like:

function createClientPacket(type, clientID, data)
    return bitser.dumps {type, clientID, data}
end

Or alternatively, if you use classes, you could do something like:

local bitser = require 'bitser'
local bitser_templates = require 'bitser-templates'
local class = require 'your-favourite-class-library'

ClientBasePacket = class('ClientBasePacket')

ClientBasePacket._template = {
	"type",
	"clientID",
	data = {},
}

bitser_templates.registerClass(ClientBasePacket)

-- then, creating a packet from a client
function createClientPacket(pkt) -- where pkt is an instance of ClientBasePacket
    return bitser.dumps(pkt)
end