"""Adds NumPy array support to msgpack. msgpack is good for (de)serializing data over a network for multiple reasons: - msgpack is secure (as opposed to pickle/dill/etc which allow for arbitrary code execution) - msgpack is widely used and has good cross-language support - msgpack does not require a schema (as opposed to protobuf/flatbuffers/etc) which is convenient in dynamically typed languages like Python and JavaScript - msgpack is fast and efficient (as opposed to readable formats like JSON/YAML/etc); I found that msgpack was ~4x faster than pickle for serializing large arrays using the below strategy The code below is adapted from GitHub - lebedov/msgpack-numpy: Serialize numpy arrays using msgpack. The reason not to use that library directly is that it falls back to pickle for object arrays. """ import functools import msgpack import numpy as np def pack_array(obj): if (isinstance(obj, (np.ndarray, np.generic))) and obj.dtype.kind in ("V", "O", "c"): raise ValueError(f"Unsupported dtype: {obj.dtype}") if isinstance(obj, np.ndarray): return { b"__ndarray__": True, b"data": obj.tobytes(), b"dtype": obj.dtype.str, b"shape": obj.shape, } if isinstance(obj, np.generic): return { b"__npgeneric__": True, b"data": obj.item(), b"dtype": obj.dtype.str, } return obj def unpack_array(obj): if b"__ndarray__" in obj: return np.ndarray(buffer=obj[b"data"], dtype=np.dtype(obj[b"dtype"]), shape=obj[b"shape"]) if b"__npgeneric__" in obj: return np.dtype(obj[b"dtype"]).type(obj[b"data"]) return obj Packer = functools.partial(msgpack.Packer, default=pack_array) packb = functools.partial(msgpack.packb, default=pack_array) Unpacker = functools.partial(msgpack.Unpacker, object_hook=unpack_array) unpackb = functools.partial(msgpack.unpackb, object_hook=unpack_array)