Hi, the format is quite simple, and it's the same in both binary and cereal. For data types with only one constructor, only the values of the constructor are encoded - not the constructor itself. data Foo = Foo Int Int deriving (Generic) So Foo is encoded as if it was only the Ints without the Foo constructor. encode (Foo 1 2) = 0x 00000001 00000002 If there are multiple constructors a tag is encoded representing the constructor, and then the values of that constructor. The tag will use as many bytes as it needs to be to fit the tag. 2-255 constructors will use 1 byte, and so on. data Fruit = Apple Int | Orange Foo encode (Apple 3) = 0x 00 00000003 First byte is zero to represent the Apple constructor, then the Int. encode (Orange (Foo 4 5)) = 0x 01 00000004 00000005 First byte is 0x01 to represent the Orange constructor, then the Foo value which is just to subsequent Ints. The format will not change without warning, and has not changed since it was implemented. That said, the generic format is mostly meant for being written and read by the haskell app that defines the data types, as it's easy to break compatibility even within the same app. JSON is probably not a bad choice, try it out http://hackage.haskell.org/package/aeson-0.6.1.0/docs/Data-Aeson.html Hope it helps! Lennart On Monday, 20 January 2014 21:28:33 UTC+4, Joey Eremondi wrote:

Makes sense. I've had trouble finding documentation on the format used by aeson, any links to that? On 2014-01-19 10:46 AM, "John Lato" javascript:> wrote:

...

I think this approach will likely lead to problems later on. First, undocumented formats are liable to change without warning. Secondly, it's conceivable that the format could change due to changes in ghc's generics support, or internal (and hence unstable) data structures of some component type.

Would it be possible to just define your own format instead, or use something like JSON that's already well-defined?

On Jan 18, 2014 12:17 PM, "Joey Eremondi" javascript:> wrote:

...

I was wondering if somebody could talk me through the default derived

format for binary serialization used, either by binary or by cereal.

...

I'm trying to share data between Haskell and another function language

(Elm) which also supports algebraic data types, so the conversion of data should be pretty trivial. I'd like to be able to just derive encode and decode in Haskell using either binary/cereal, and then write a parser for the same format in Elm. The trick is, I don't know what that format is.

...

Is there any documentation on it, or if not, is anybody familiar enough

with it that they could explain the format to me?

...

Thanks!

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