Investigate bitcode vs bincode for filesystem

[RobDavenport]

Currently, we use bincode.

bitcode was recently released which has better compression (size) in exchange for slightly slower speeds. Could be benefecial to switch over if the gains are big enough.

[RobDavenport]

Recent benchmarks:

https://david.kolo.ski/rust_serialization_benchmark/

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13hwwhj/bitcode_04_release_binary_serialization_format/

This seems like it would be worth it now.

[RobDavenport]

Interestingly I ran a test with this on the 3d example and somehow came up with a bigger file:

1. bincode + zstd: 143kb
2. bitcode raw: 443kb
3. bitcode + zstd: 168kb

[RobDavenport]

Closing this for now, seems unnecessary to continue exploring this at this point

[caibear]

bitcode author here, your test on Feb 4 was with an old version of bitcode (presumably 0.4 or 0.5). These old versions didn't compress very well because they serialized bits while compression like zstd operates on bytes. Luckily I have released a new version bitcode = "0.6" which compresses much better.

Using version 3de7156db381dd2fa1943d59551360819e3e27f7 because the latest version failed to deserialize, I ran some tests on example_3d.gcrom. I initially measured a small regression from bincode 160kb -> 164kb. However, after further investigation I managed to get an improvement to 115kb with a small code change.

I replaced

gamercade_console/gamercade_core/src/graphics/color.rs

Lines 20 to 54 in 31bec15

	#[derive(Clone, Copy, Debug, Default, PartialEq, Eq, PartialOrd, Ord)]
	pub struct Color {
	pub r: u8,
	pub g: u8,
	pub b: u8,
	pub a: u8,
	}
	impl<'de> Deserialize<'de> for Color {
	fn deserialize<D>(deserializer: D) -> Result<Self, D::Error>
	where
	D: Deserializer<'de>,
	{
	let hex = if deserializer.is_human_readable() {
	let hex: String = Deserialize::deserialize(deserializer)?;
	u32::from_str_radix(&hex, 16).map_err(serde::de::Error::custom)?
	} else {
	Deserialize::deserialize(deserializer)?
	};
	Ok(Color::from_hex(hex))
	}
	}
	impl Serialize for Color {
	fn serialize<S>(&self, serializer: S) -> Result<S::Ok, S::Error>
	where
	S: serde::Serializer,
	{
	if serializer.is_human_readable() {
	serializer.serialize_str(&format!("{:x}", self.to_hex()))
	} else {
	serializer.serialize_u32(self.to_hex())
	}
	}
	}

with #[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)] which serializes the color as (u8, u8, u8, u8) instead of u32. This allows bitcode to leverage its improved compression (but has no effect on bincode). Assuming you want to keep the human readable representation, I recommend using (self.r, self.g, self.b, self.a).serialize(serializer) to achieve the same effect.

[RobDavenport]

Thanks for looking into this. Going to re-open the issue as it will be worth it to look into it again in the future!