attrs2bin

attrs2bin is a Python library that lets you serialize/deserialize your attrs-based classes to/from a byte stream. It is compatible with Rust's bincode, so you can seralize objects in Python, send the resulting byte stream through a socket or any other transport and deserialize it back to a Rust object (and vice versa). It can also deserialize objects from a socket (see below).

Installation

attrs2bin is hosted on PyPI:

python -m pip install attrs2bin

Example

attrs2bin provides just two simple functions: serialize(), which takes an object and returns a byte stream, and deserialize(), that takes a byte stream and an attrs-based class and returns an object.

import attr
import attrs2bin

@attr.s(auto_attribs=True)
class Sprite:
    name: str
    x: int
    y: int

my_sprite = Sprite("My sprite", 35, 70)
serialized = attrs2bin.serialize(my_sprite)
deserialized = attrs2bin.deserialize(serialized, Sprite)
assert my_sprite == deserialized

What can be serialized?

Objects of any attrs-based class can be serialized, as long as all their fields have a type (using type annotations or attr.ib(type=...)). attrs2bin ships with serializers for the following types:

• int
• float
• bytes
• str
• bool

You can create and register your own serializers for specific types by creating a class that implements attrs2bin.interfaces.ITypeSerializer and calling attrs2bin.register_serializer().

Deserializing from a socket

Instead of deserialize(bytes, cls), you can use deserialize_from_socket(sck, cls), which will read the necessary bytes from a socket and return a Python object. sck must be any object that implements attrs2bin.interfaces.IReadableSocket.

Rust compatibility

The serializers that ship with attrs2bin are all compatible with Rust's bincode library. Keep under your pillow the following table in order to create compatible types between Python and Rust:

Python type	Rust type
int / attrs2bin.SignedInt	i64
attrs2bin.UnsignedInt	u64
float / attrs2bin.Float64	f64
attrs2bin.Float32	f32
bytes	Vec<u8>
str	String
bool	bool