Progress has been slow since the turn of the year, but I've finally addressed a thorny issue that has been a problem for a long time.
The previous serialization library, protobuf-net, had no officially supported solution for pre-generating the serialization routines, required for platforms that only allow for AOT (ahead of time) compiled programs instead of JIT (just in time) like iOS and UWP.
The MessagePack format has been around for a long time, but the MessagePack for C# library has recently come on leaps and bounds after being adopted by a Microsoft employee for use within Visual Studio itself. Among it's features are the ability to pre-generate serialization code as an MSBuild task, essentially making the process invisible. This is especially important as ideally users shouldn't have to care about the mechanics of how their game loads and saves.
Initial
benchmarks looked good, and tests on real world examples
even better. I've now incorporated MessagePack into the XAGE pipeline and while there is more testing to do, it's looking like I'll be pulling protobuf out entirely.
Combined with CoreRT, the startup times are so much better, and general performance and memory usage is also good.
