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I am considering the use of serialize() and deserialize() for all of my data i/o due to their convenience. I do not, however, want to be stuck with unreadable files on a Julia update.

How stable are serialize() and deserialize()? Should they work between updates of 0.3? Can I expect safe behavior if I stick to basic types like arrays of Float64?

Thank you.

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If you want to store data you might depend on being able to read in the future, you should not use a format that will incorporate breaking changes if/when someone finds it useful. As far as I understand the default serialization format is for network communications, so it is designed for maximum performance.

There is also the HDF5.jl package that uses a documented format and a common library that has wrappers for different languages.

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the problem with HDF5 is that there are types that you can't serialize. For example, I just got the following error when trying to serialize a GLM model: "MethodError: no method matching write(::HDF5File, ::String, ::StatsModels.DataFrameRegressionModel)"
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I believe the official answer here is, "people will try not to break the serialization format, but you shouldn't depend upon on it."

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You can treat the combination of the official docs with Jeff's comment on this diff as a citation. julia.readthedocs.org/en/latest/stdlib/base + github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/…

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