From: why the lucky stiff <ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2004-05-05T01:28:24+09:00
Subject: Re: YAML vs. Marshal

Joel VanderWerf wrote:

> Marshal is, in my experience, a bit faster.

For small documents, my benchmarks have Marshal running at 3x the speed 
of Ruby's YAML parser.  For larger documents, this often decreases to 
2x.  For output, I'm sure YAML is quite a bit slower than Marshal.  I 
haven't benched it, though. 

I'm also working on the YAML bytecode parser, which should run as 
quickly as Marshal does.  Yep.

Mostly you want to use YAML in place of Marshal if:
* You need portable serialization.
* You will be hand-editing your objects.
* You need to read saved objects (for debugging).

YAML bytecode will only really solve the first of those.

_why