kr.angelov:
The binary package is too lazy and in some cases the decoding dies with "stack overflow". At least this was the situation the last time when I tried to use it. Since then I am using hacked version which is stricter. This should be addressed before to add this package to the platform.
The stack overflow with [a] was fixed a few months ago. I'd be interested to know if there were other issues with instances.
Another problem that I see is that Int is serialized as 64 bit integer. This makes the serialized data too large. The Int type is also used internally, for example to store the length of a list, the size of a map, etc, so you can't avoid the problem by using custom putInt function. In fact the binary representation is so verbose that sometimes it is more compact to use textual representation. In my hacked version I use serialization for integers which use variable number of bytes. If someone wants to store 64 bit integer then he/she could always use Int64. I know that the binary package could be combined with gzip to make the data more compact but this is unnecessary overhead.
For this, we recommend the lazy zlib library to compress as you see fit. -- Don