CoDeSe

Abstract

Many tools for automated testing, model checking, and debugging store and restore program states multiple times. Storing/restoring a program state is commonly done with serialization/deserialization. Traditionally, the format for stored states is based on data: serialization generates the data that encodes the state, and deserialization interprets this data to restore the state. We propose a new approach, called CoDeSe, where the format for stored states is based on code: serialization generates code whose execution restores the state, and deserialization simply executes the code. We implemented CoDeSe in Java and performed a number of experiments on deserialization of states. CoDeSe provides on average more than 6X speedup over the highly optimized deserialization from the standard Java library. Our new format also allows simple parallel deserialization that can provide additional speedup on top of the sequential CoDeSe but only for larger states.