All, In order to implement some network protocol clients recently, I needed binary serialization of commands and deserialization of responses ('Command -> ByteString' and 'ByteString -> Response' functions, preferably for both strict as well as lazy ByteStrings). My go-to packages have always been 'binary' and 'cereal', but I was wondering about the current (and future) state/goals: - cereal supports chunk-based 'partial' parsing (runGetPartial). It looks like support for this is introduced in recent versions of 'binary' as well (runGetIncremental) - cereal can output a strict bytestring (runPut) or a lazy one (runPutLazy), whilst binary only outputs lazy ones (runPut) - Next to binary and cereal, there's bytestring's Builder interface for serialization, and Simon Meier's "blaze-binary" prototype There are some blog posts and comments out there about merging cereal and binary, is this what's the goal/going on (cfr runGetIncremental)? In my use-case I think using Builder instead of binary/cereal's PutM monad shouldn't be a major problem. Is this advisable performance-wise? Overall: what's the advised future-proof strategy of handling binary (de)serialization? Thanks, Nicolas