# Packer

A space-efficient term serializer, with specific attention paid to handling
large, nested / repetitive terms. The latter is somewhere that the usual
:erlang.term_to_binary/1 really struggles with, often to the point of preventing
the transmission of messages containing large lists / maps of lists / maps / tuples
between nodes.

Pack significantly reduces the space required to serialize a term by utilizing a
schema + data buffer approach with support for shape repetition (e.g. "N * two-tuple
of integers") and using zstd for compression of the data buffer.

```
  NOTE: this library is still in early development, and not ready for production use.
  Documentation of the serialization format, apidocs, etc. will come after 0.1.0.
```

## Installation

Packer can be installed by by adding `packer` to your list of dependencies in `mix.exs`:

```elixir
def deps do
  [
    {:packer, "~> 0.0.1"}
  ]
end
```

Docs can be found at [https://hexdocs.pm/packer](https://hexdocs.pm/packer).