Akka.NET serialization with MessagePack

The Akka.Serialization.MessagePack plugin is designed to:

• Be Low Ceremony for common cases.
• Allow flexiblity for advanced cases.
• Provide High Performance
• Allow for Optional LZ4 compaction.

This plugin has a few different options to control payload serialization/deserialization:

• allow-assembly-version-mismatch
  • If False, Assembly version mismatches between payload and availiable deserializer will throw.
  • Default is True
• omit-assembly-version
  • Controls whether Assembly version is included in payload.

One can do a form of 'Schema evolution' (if you squint at it from the right angle) with MessagePack payload definitions.

Consider the following:

[MessagePackObject(false)]
public class WireType
{
   [Key(0)]
   public int Foo {get;set;}
   [Key(1)]
   public string Bar {get;set;}
   [Key(2)]
   public byte[] Bin {get;set;}
}

The above uses Messagepack attributes to define that every item is packed into an array.

If one wanted to add a new field, they could do, for example,

[MessagePackObject(false)]
public class WireType
{
   [Key(0)]
   public int Foo {get;set;}
   [Key(1)]
   public string Bar {get;set;}
   [Key(2)]
   public byte[] Bin {get;set;}
   [Key(3)]
   public byte[]? OtherBin {get;set;}
}

The consumer will, of course, need to do it's own checks for whether OtherBin is null, however the serializer itself will be able to handle using/ignoring data appropriately.

Two additional notes:

1. Any empty slots will be filled with nil up to the max Key in the array. So, in the above example, if OtherBin had a Key index of 64, it would be serialized as a 64 slot array with 60 nil values between Bin and OtherBin.
2. One can apply inheritance and DU-style behavior via attributes, see the MP docs for details.

Bind MessagePack serializer using following HOCON configuration in your actor system settings:

akka {
  actor {
    serializers {
      messagepack = "Akka.Serialization.MessagePack.MsgPackSerializer, Akka.Serialization.MessagePack"
    }
    serialization-bindings {
      "System.Object" = messagepack
    }
  }
}

BenchmarkDotNet=v0.10.9, OS=Windows 10 Redstone 2 (10.0.15063)
Processor=Intel Core i5-6400 CPU 2.70GHz (Skylake), ProcessorCount=4
Frequency=2648439 Hz, Resolution=377.5809 ns, Timer=TSC
.NET Core SDK=2.0.0
  [Host]      : .NET Core 2.0.0 (Framework 4.6.00001.0), 64bit RyuJIT
  NETCORE 2.0 : .NET Core 2.0.0 (Framework 4.6.00001.0), 64bit RyuJIT

Job=NETCORE 2.0  Platform=X64  Runtime=Core  
Server=True  Toolchain=CoreCsProj  

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