A custom Julia serialization method that works for any primitive type

serialization.jl

# Originally written to work with InlineString in WeakRefStrings, this should work for any primitive type

# In most cases, the built-in defaults provided by Julia work fine, using `read` and `write`.
# However, if your `read` and `write` methods are not round-trippable, or they convert your data into a 
# less-efficient representation before writing, then you might want to additionally define a custom 
# serialization method, using this code.
# It should only be necessary to substitute your type for `Primitive`.

using Serialization

abstract type Primitive end
primitive type Primitive128 <: Primitive 128 end
primitive type Primitive256 <: Primitive 256 end

function Serialization.serialize(s::AbstractSerializer, x::T) where {T<:Primitive}
    Serialization.serialize_type(s, T)
    unsafe_write(s.io, Ref{T}(x), sizeof(T))
    return nothing
end

function Serialization.deserialize(s::AbstractSerializer, ::Type{T}) where {T<:Primitive}
    ref = Ref{T}()
    unsafe_read(s.io, ref, sizeof(T))
    return ref[]
end