PhotonVision/photon-serde

Photon Serde Autocode

Like Rosmsg. But worse.

Goals

• As fast as possible (only slightly slower than packed structs, ideally)
• Support for variable length arrays and optional types
• Allow deserialization into user-defined, possibly nested, types. See ResultList for an example of this.

Design

The code for a single type is split across 3 files. Let's look at PnpResult:

• The struct definition: This is the data the object holds. Auto-generated. The data this object holds can be primitives or other, fully-deserialized types (like Vec2)
• The user class: This is the fully-deserialized PnpResult type. This contains extra functions users might need to expose like Amgiguity, or other computed helper things.
• The serde interface: This is a template specilization for converting the user class to/from bytes

Prior art

• Protobuf: slow on embedded platforms (at least quickbuf is)
• Wpi's struct: no VLAs/optionals
• Rosmsg: I'm not using ros, but I'm stealing their message hash idea