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[com.taoensso/nippy "2.6.2"] ; Stable (please upgrade from v2.6.0 ASAP)

v2.6 is a major, backwards-compatible release with: improved performance (incl. frozen data size), a new low-level DataInput/DataOuput API, improved support for headerless freezing, and 1-to-1 binary-value representation guarantees. See the CHANGELOG for details.

Clojure's rich data types are awesome. And its reader allows you to take your data just about anywhere. But the reader can be painfully slow when you've got a lot of data to crunch (like when you're serializing to a database).

Nippy is an attempt to provide a reliable, high-performance drop-in alternative to the reader. It's used, among others, as the Carmine Redis client and Faraday DynamoDB client serializer.

• Small, uncomplicated all-Clojure library.
• Great performance.
• Comprehesive support for all standard data types.
• Easily extendable to custom data types. (v2.1+)
• Java's Serializable fallback when available. (v2.5+)
• Reader-fallback for all other types (including Clojure 1.4+ tagged literals).
• Full test coverage for every supported type.
• Fully pluggable compression, including built-in high-performance Snappy compressor.
• Fully pluggable encryption, including built-in high-strength AES128 enabled with a single :password [:salted "my-password"] option. (v2+)
• Utils for easy integration into 3rd-party tools/libraries. (v2+)

• LZ4 compressor by mpenet (v2+).

Add the necessary dependency to your Leiningen project.clj and require the library in your ns:

[com.taoensso/nippy "2.6.2"] ; project.clj
(ns my-app (:require [taoensso.nippy :as nippy])) ; ns

As an example of what Nippy can do, let's take a look at its own reference stress data:

nippy/stress-data
=>
{:bytes        (byte-array [(byte 1) (byte 2) (byte 3)])
 :nil          nil
 :boolean      true

 :char-utf8    \ಬ
 :string-utf8  "ಬಾ ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಸಂಭವಿಸ"
 :string-long  (apply str (range 1000))
 :keyword      :keyword
 :ns-keyword   ::keyword

 :queue        (-> (PersistentQueue/EMPTY) (conj :a :b :c :d :e :f :g))
 :queue-empty  (PersistentQueue/EMPTY)
 :sorted-set   (sorted-set 1 2 3 4 5)
 :sorted-map   (sorted-map :b 2 :a 1 :d 4 :c 3)

 :list         (list 1 2 3 4 5 (list 6 7 8 (list 9 10)))
 :list-quoted  '(1 2 3 4 5 (6 7 8 (9 10)))
 :list-empty   (list)
 :vector       [1 2 3 4 5 [6 7 8 [9 10]]]
 :vector-empty []
 :map          {:a 1 :b 2 :c 3 :d {:e 4 :f {:g 5 :h 6 :i 7}}}
 :map-empty    {}
 :set          #{1 2 3 4 5 #{6 7 8 #{9 10}}}
 :set-empty    #{}
 :meta         (with-meta {:a :A} {:metakey :metaval})
 :lazy-seq     (repeatedly 1000 rand)

 :byte         (byte 16)
 :short        (short 42)
 :integer      (int 3)
 :long         (long 3)
 :bigint       (bigint 31415926535897932384626433832795)

 :float        (float 3.14)
 :double       (double 3.14)
 :bigdec       (bigdec 3.1415926535897932384626433832795)

 :ratio        22/7
 :uuid         (java.util.UUID/randomUUID)
 :date         (java.util.Date.)

 :stress-record (->StressRecord "data")

 ;; Serializable
 :throwable    (Throwable. "Yolo")
 :exception    (try (/ 1 0) (catch Exception e e))
 :ex-info      (ex-info "ExInfo" {:data "data"})}

Serialize it:

(def frozen-stress-data (nippy/freeze nippy/stress-data))
=> #<byte[] [B@3253bcf3>

Deserialize it:

(nippy/thaw frozen-stress-data)
=> {:bytes        (byte-array [(byte 1) (byte 2) (byte 3)])
    :nil          nil
    :boolean      true
    <...> }

Couldn't be simpler!

See also the lower-level freeze-to-out! and thaw-from-in! fns for operating on DataOutput and DataInput types directly.

Nippy v2+ also gives you dead simple data encryption. Add a single option to your usual freeze/thaw calls like so:

(nippy/freeze nippy/stress-data {:password [:salted "my-password"]}) ; Encrypt
(nippy/thaw   <encrypted-data>  {:password [:salted "my-password"]}) ; Decrypt

There's two default forms of encryption on offer: :salted and :cached. Each of these makes carefully-chosen trade-offs and is suited to one of two common use cases. See the aes128-encryptor docstring for a detailed explanation of why/when you'd want one or the other.

(defrecord MyType [data])

(nippy/extend-freeze MyType 1 ; A unique type id ∈[1, 128]
  [x data-output]
  (.writeUTF data-output (:data x)))

(nippy/extend-thaw 1 ; Same type id
  [data-input]
  (->MyType (.readUTF data-input)))

(nippy/thaw (nippy/freeze (->MyType "Joe"))) => #taoensso.nippy.MyType{:data "Joe"}

Detailed benchmark information is available on Google Docs.

lein start-dev to get a (headless) development repl that you can connect to with Cider (emacs) or your IDE.

Please use the project's GitHub issues page for project questions/comments/suggestions/whatever (pull requests welcome!). Am very open to ideas if you have any!

Otherwise reach me (Peter Taoussanis) at taoensso.com or on Twitter. Cheers!

Copyright © 2012-2014 Peter Taoussanis. Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.