Binary serialization of arbitrary objects beween Objective C and C#?

Question

We want to pass a forest - a dictionary with values which can be: dictionaries, arrays, sets, numbers, strings, byte buffers - between Objective C and C# efficiently (time-wise, space is a lesser concern). Google's Protocol Buffers looked good, but they seem to handle only structured data, while ours is arbitrary. Ultimately we can write a binary (de)serialiser ourselves, but surely this was done before and released as FOSS somewhere?

Answer 1

Have you considered using ASN.1? Since ASN.1 is independent of programing language or system architecture, it can be used efficiently regardless of whether you need C, C#, C++, or Java.

You create a description of the information you wish to exchange, and the use an ASN.1 tool to generate an encoder/decoder for your target programming language. ASN.1 also supports a few different rules for transmitting the date which range from the efficient PER (Packed Encoding Rules) to the verbose, but flexible XER (XML Encoding Rules).

To play with ASN.1 to see if this might work for you, try the free online ASN.1 compiler and encoder/decoder at http://asn1-playground.oss.com to see if this might work for you.