Serd
Serd is a lightweight C library for RDF syntax which supports reading and writing Turtle, TRiG, NTriples, and NQuads. Serd is suitable for performance-critical or resource-limited applications, such as serialising very large data sets, network protocols, or embedded systems that require minimal dependencies and lightweight deployment.
Features
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Free: Serd is Free Software released under the extremely liberal ISC license.
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Portable and Dependency Free: Serd has no external dependencies other than the C standard library. It is known to compile with GCC, Clang, and MSVC (as C++), and is tested on GNU/Linux, several BSD variants, Mac OS X, and Windows.
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Small: Serd is implemented in few thousand lines of standard C code. It typically compiles to about 100 KiB, or about 50 KiB stripped with size optimizations.
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Fast and Lightweight: Serd can stream abbreviated Turtle, unlike many tools which must first build an internal model. This makes it particularly useful for writing very large data sets, since it can do so using only a small amount of memory. Serd is, to the author's knowledge, the fastest Turtle reader/writer by a wide margin (see Performance below).
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Conformant and Well-Tested: Serd passes all tests in the Turtle and TRiG test suites, correctly handles all "normal" examples in the URI specification, and includes many additional tests which were written manually or discovered with fuzz testing. The test suite has 100% code coverage by line, and runs with zero memory errors or leaks.
Performance
The benchmarks below compare serdi
, rapper
, and riot
re-serialising Turtle data generated by sp2b on an i7-4980HQ running Debian 9. Of the three, serdi
is the fastest by a wide margin, and the only one that uses a constant amount of memory (a single page) for all input sizes.