Wild Strawberry manga started serialization on July 14, 2023, marking the debut work of talented writer and illustrator Yonemoto Ire.

Wild Strawberry manga: Where to read, what to expect, and more

Warning: SPOILERS lie ahead for Loki season 2, episode 3, "1893"!                                                                                                                                      Balder the Brave's statue in Loki season 2 serves to remind Loki and the audience of his godly power,

Loki Season 2 Episode 3's Balder The Brave Easter Egg & Doctor Strange 2 Connection Addressed By MCU Director

The connection between Hunter X-5 and General Dox in the show hints at a potential storyline for Brad Wolfe as the MCU's version of Zaniac, but it remains uncertain how much setup this Easter egg actually entails.

Loki Season 2's Kingo & Zaniac Easter Eggs Detailed By Episode 2 Director

Loki’s second season recently premiered its third episode on Disney+, which is full of easter eggs and connections with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Loki Season 2 is teasing a reunion with Thor, while bringing in new characters into the MCU

Though Peter Quill will return to the MCU, he will play a different role and likely leave soon. Here are 10 characters who can replace Star-Lord.

10 Heroes Who Can Replace Star-Lord In The MCU

Loki season 2 episode 2 director Dan Deleeuw discusses Marvel Easter eggs, his own theories about the timelines, and working with the Russo brothers.

Loki Director Dan Deleeuw On MCU Easter Eggs & Timeline Theories In Season 2

Episode 2 of Loki, "Breaking Brad", transports Loki and Mobius to 1977 London on the Sacred Timeline, where Hunter X-05 has made a name for himself as actor Brad Wolfe, starring in a monster movie called "Zaniac". The theatre and surrounding streets display various film posters, including one for a Kingo-led feature.

Loki Season 2 Plants Two Marvel Character Easter Eggs in Episode 2

"Loki" Season 2 has brought the heat when it comes to fun Easter eggs and marvel fans on social media have caught them with hawkish precision.

Loki Season 2: The Marvel Movie Easter Egg In Episode 2 Only MCU Fanatics Caught

Loki is full of easter eggs. There are so many easter eggs you wonder if Loki didn’t put them there himself as part of some interdimensional scavenger hunt. In this episode of season 2 titled “Breaking Brad,” we get a look at tons of little comic book secrets, as well as that great pun in the title.

Loki: Breaking Down Every Easter Egg in Season 2 Episode 2

Kingo

kingo

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Global financial markets are tumbling again as market sell-off accelerates due to fears of lockdowns occurring again in parts of Europe. As the hopes of a faster economic recovery die down, the situation for small and medium enterprises and individuals is becoming bleaker day by day due to a fall in demand and no hopes for a fiscal stimulus from the government. With a dip in the business activity, individuals must hedge themselves against various financial and budgetary risks that are arising in the market today. I sat down with Jon Squires, CEO of Currency.com; a CIS regulated exchange for trading tokenized stocks, indices, commodities, and FX pairs with fiat or crypto to talk about global financial markets, technology, and how investors should hedge themselves against the market downside. Ishan Pandey: Why is the sell-off in stocks, indices, and cryptocurrencies intensifying globally? Jon Squires: The pandemic-driven recession is turning out to be a huge obstacle, much more significant than what financial analysts predicted. The global markets were rallying after a massive sell-off in February based on hopes of recovery and an increase in demand after lockdowns are lifted. But, what we see right now is that the demand in the consumer market has more or less decreased and in some sectors has completely collapsed. There are various reasons for this; for example, the increase in unemployment has created a demand shock in the consumer markets. Individuals who are getting jobs again are spending less and saving more. This is a global trend, as now people are living on the principles of minimalism, not because they want but because of pay cuts, decrease in demand, and increase in coronavirus cases are forcing individuals to protect themselves against an unpredictable future. Fiscal and monetary stimulus-induced in the economy has had its results, but we are still not sure that such stimulus has actually propped up demand in the market. More fiscal stimulus is needed and we fear that the federal reserves have used most of their corrective measures simultaneously, leaving them with very few options right now. The central banks can’t print more money now or it is going to result in inflation at levels that we have not seen before. That’s why central banks must focus on fiscal stimulus and reforms wherever needed to stabilize the market. The best option for the government would be to put money directly in the hands of consumers and households. The truth is that there is a massive gap between the “stock market” and the “real market.” Financial Institutions, Banks, Hedge Funds, Investment Banks, high net worth individuals and retail investors are disconnected from the ground reality living in a bubble. Most are working remotely from homes, expecting consumers to go out and delve into comfort shopping, and that is not happening in various sectors as predicted. This drop in retail demand in turn puts more small businesses into financial distress, leading to more redundancies. Ishan Pandey: How can investors and individuals hedge themselves against the current uncertainties in the market? Jon Squires: Right now, the aim of a private individual or a retail investor should be to save what he/she has and allocate capital in less risk and volatile markets. Gold is a good option, with bets on technology stocks as they have witnessed continued growth even during the pandemic. Investing right now is very important for individuals because if their money is kept parked in their savings account, they are losing anyway due to inflation. Retail inflation has increased by more than 3-6% globally, and this is a worrying trend for investors. Gold, Silver, and Indices are the best bet right now. What we are seeing is that even the cryptocurrencies market is directly correlated to the global financial markets. I think this is due to the same reasons that the psychology of the market is changing. Ishan Pandey: What assets, bonds, and capital market instruments should investors look at? Right now, the portfolio of investors should be focussed on creating diversified holdings with a focus on sectors such as technology, e-commerce, pharma, etc. These sectors are really doing well during the pandemic. Even tokenized bonds, shares, and tokenized assets are an excellent option for investors to hedge themselves against any risk. Currency.com offers tokenized equity and debt instruments to investors as a hedge with tight spreads and excellent liquidity. Currently, high volatility is going to exist in markets, which is an opportunity for investors to create portfolio holdings that can yield high returns in the future. As they say, billionaires are made at times of recession. There is a reason for this that during a recession, investors with cash are in an enviable position, and they can purchase assets, companies, and products at a price lower than the market price and even in various cases, at a price lower than the fair market price. This is where opportunities lie for investors, and that’s why the current market strategy should be to save what you have and invest conservatively. Jon Squires: Ishan Pandey: Can you explain what tokenized assets are and how they work in financial markets? Tokenization is a method of materializing the ownership in a financial instrument by creating a “token” executed on a distributed ledger technology ( DLT) database. Jon Squires: Tokens created by Currency.com make it possible for investors to participate in top global price volatility. Tokenized assets are tokens that equate to a single underlying asset (e.g., share of Amazon, Adobe, Netflix, cash, oil, gold, etc.). When the price of the actual commodity increases, so does the tokenized instrument. When the price of the actual asset decreases, the tokenized security matches it exactly. As such, investing in tokenized assets gives the same potential for benefit as conventional assets. For example, a Netflix.cx token indicates the success of a NFLX share on the Nasdaq. Users of tokenized asset exchanges use their cryptocurrency holdings to acquire Netflix.cx and transfer it as though they were buying Netflix’s own equity. Ofcourse, the trades are carried out with strength, transparency, and high velocity with tight spread and volume. A tokenized security is a blockchain-powered commercial, financial commodity that satisfies all the regulatory criteria of the nation in which it is regulated. The great option here is that tokenized assets allow you to exchange and benefit from the underlying market price of conventional assets with your crypto holdings. You don’t need to trade them for fiat anymore. Robust and irreversible blockchain technologies underpin the tokenized properties. Making a trade would send you a token that travels according to the price of the underlying instrument. Essentially, they allow investors to take advantage of market-wide price action without converting the crypto portfolio into a fiat. Ishan Pandey: What are your views on the US dollar? Is the dollar more powerful now as the reserve currency of the world? It is a difficult question to answer right now as we are still in a pandemic. The winner would be chosen only after the dust settles but nevertheless, what we are seeing is that from an institutional point of view, there is less incentive to hold dollars now. For example, central banks in Europe, Japan, and South-Asian Countries used to hold dollars to provide them with a very secure, risk-free, and medium yielding source as compared to the interest rates in Europe and Japan. But right now, as the interest rates in the US have decreased to the levels similar to that of Europe and Japan, there is much less incentive for banks and governments to park their money in dollars. This is a problem which the dollar is facing couple that with the problem that the Federal Reserve is printing a lot of money, which is creating excess supply in the market. But on the other hand, there is no other market instrument that government institutions and banks can rely on. China is coming up with its digital currency, but that is just too risky for European banks, Syndicates, and Japanese financial institutions to even consider. Due to the absence of alternatives, the dollar is still going to be the king. Jon Squires: Ishan Pandey: Do you think that Yuan/Renminbi would be able to overtake the dollar as the currency of the world? Jon Squires: The Republic of China is giving a tough fight to the US, but the problem is that they are basing a lot of their strategy on digitizing Yuan on the blockchain. To be a top global reserve currency and to maintain your position, these actions won’t be enough. Maintaining hegemony globally is all about economics, foreign relations, and soft power. This type of politics is something which the Chinese government doesn't prioritise with the major Western financial centres. With stressed relations at borders at all fronts, be it Japan, India, and even Russia, it is highly unlikely Yuan would overtake the dollar. Why would Vietnam hold their reserves in Yuan when China is creating problems at their border? This is what the Chinese government is missing at the moment - building economic partnerships with influential markets. It lost a major opportunity with its actions in Hong Kong. Further, the recent gold scam committed by Kingold, where fake bullion worth 20 billion yuan was pledged, and later it turned out to be gilded copper, has only cemented the beliefs of various institutional investors that dealing with China comes with various critical risks. The gold had been inspected not only by the lenders and insurers involved but also by state organisations like the Hubei provincial assay office and gem certification center of China in Wuhan. Ishan Pandey: What trends, opportunities, and challenges do you see in 2020-2021? Jon Squires: Agri-tech is going to be a trend that we are watching. Agricultural practices have long been plagued by redundancy and they are due a complete overhaul. With locust attacks in Africa, the Middle East, and in South Asia, we can see a global food shortage pending due to which modernizing agriculture at an accelerated pace is going to become very important. No one is talking about this because right now, the world is facing multiple problems all at the same time due to which some issues are being brushed under the carpet. Financial markets are also seeing an overhaul with the introduction of tokenized instruments, which provides investors with better avenues to park and invest their wealth all at one venue. More companies are using unique and sophisticated tools in their business operations, and this trend is going to be continued. The purpose of this article is to remove informational asymmetry existing today in our digital markets by performing due diligence by asking the right questions and equipping readers with better opinions to make informed decisions. The material does not constitute any investment, financial, or legal advice. Please do your research before investing in any digital assets or tokens, etc. The writer does not have any vested interest in the company. Interviewer - Ishan Pandey

Jon Squires Interview: Key Tactics To Protect Yourself From Inflation 

is an that lets backend and frontend developers collaborate, and when the API changes in any way. apibeats provides a complete environment for you to interact with your APIs. It lets you create collections of endpoints and watch them for uptime/downtime and changes in structure, test your collections by making requests without writing any code and document your API collections. apibeats API maintenance platform notifies teams on Slack & Email Powered by my company, , apibeats was born out of the sheer necessity of maintaining an active channel of communication between stakeholders of a project, a problem that we faced often in our work. If changes were made to APIs at any point in time and not communicated, it resulted in an overhead that wasn’t welcome. apibeats and its ability to notify changes in API structures instantly was a saving grace for us and we decided to share it with all the dev communities out there. GeekyAnts That’s not all. apibeats can do a lot more. Slack & Email Notifications You can connect apibeats to your Slack Workspace, your Email chain or both. Whenever any change is made in the structure of an API by either the frontend or the backend team, apibeats sends a notification with the name of the API, the path, details of changes made and an option to view diff instantly. Cool, eh? Snapshots Of Diffs Whenever a change in APIs is detected, apibeats generates a snapshot of the previous structure and the new structure post change of the API and color codes them to make it easy for you and your team to read and understand. You will get these diffs in your Slack/Email notifications and are viewable in a single click. ‘Timeline’ of changes A neat feature of apibeats is the ability to view the history of changes made to APIs in a collection in a simple ‘timeline’ fashion. The history feature records structural changes, datatype changes as well as uptime and downtime of APIs. You can hover over the particular change event you want to review and simply click on it to get details ‘Test’ your APIs in a click. With apibeats, it is really easy to test your endpoints for responses. apibeats provides a set of API calls that you can use to test your endpoints. You can select the API call (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE), set parameters, enter the URL in the address bar and click on test. apibeats shows the HTML response of your APIs based on your selection Import from Postman We have made migrating to apibeats seamless. If you have existing collections in Postman, you can import them all in apibeats without any hassle. You can either import entire collections from Postman into a new project in apibeats or import collections into existing projects in apibeats and start getting notified for the changes made in them. It's easy, simple and saves you the hassle of creating your collections from scratch. Document Your APIs apibeats documents your API collections automatically. While we don’t have an option to generate documentation in PDF format yet, the collection, environment and request you create acts as a documentation for your project. This makes it quick and easy for developers to understand all of the features of an API. For all ‘environments’ apibeats can be used for Production as well as dev environments. Environments are used to easily switch between development and production servers. apibeats let you customize requests using variables so you can easily switch between different setups without changing your requests. at . Try apibeats today www.apibeats.com It’s free… for now.

apibeats: Get Notified on Slack When The API Changes

What is it about Svelte that makes it the most eligible bachelor in the front-end dev scene along with the likes of React & Vue? I mean, Svelte could be the next big thing, but does it have what it takes? See for yourself. Spelling it out. Svelte can be overwhelmingly unbelievable at a glance, but don’t look the other way because some things can be too good and true. Everything that makes Svelte a big deal can be found within how it is spelled, so let’s spell the damned thing: S- Simple According to the devs who have tried their hand at Svelte, it is by far the easiest to understand amongst its peers. The likes of React & Vue use a boilerplate, irrespective of what you’re trying to build or how big or small it is. Svelte does not use a boilerplate. Since Svelte is a borderline compiler, it allows choosing different constraints, reduces the overhead garbage collection and decreases your overall fuss meter. V - No Virtual DOM I wanted to spell V as Versatile but then again, we can make a few exceptions for the sake of simplicity, can’t we? Like it says on the official Svelte website, it aims to ‘retire the Virtual DOM is Fast myth once and for all.’ Virtual DOMs are faster than Real DOMs but, & I know this might be controversial, they are complex. Svelte does away with virtual DOMs and shifts the process into a compile step, that generates framework-free JS code, which in turn, you guessed it, is smaller, faster and plays the goodbye song to Virtual DOMs. E - Eloquent There is absolutely no framework exclusive syntax to memorize. Svelte also sees a frequent use of <script> & <style> tags (framework-less development, put your hands up!) which makes the learning curve much less steep and is absolutely beginner friendly. L - Less Code Readability of code in Svelte is at an all time high, because there are practically lesser lines of code to write. One of the underlying principles behind writing Svelte was to reduce the amount of lines of code that you would have to write and rightfully so, it achieves that. Stats say that the amount of code to be written in Svelte is roughly three times smaller than React. Now that’s attention worthy, atleast for me. T - Truly Reactive An age old concept which constitutes the very heart of modern UI development, Reactivity is what Svelte 3.0 is all about. The ‘this.setState’ of React is now replaced by ‘=’ in Svelte, which updates your app without using explicit functions. This also means that there are no complex State Management Libraries in Svelte. States are handled internally and don’t require any external interference. E - Epic The above key features of Svelte do push this framework towards the epic column in my books. I also read somewhere that Svelte is a product from the creators of Ractive.js and it makes sense. Svelte inherits a lot of features from this template driven UI library that has long strayed from the mainstream dev scene. The Dark Horse Of The Industry During the time I clocked in for my research, I came across an interesting thing that I felt was important to share. Many big names such as the New York Times & Spotify, amongst an ocean of others, have made the shift to Svelte and are loving it. But what was more interesting is that there are only three companies in the world that are providing Svelte Development Services (subject to change at the time of publishing). If you’re looking for services in Svelte, these are the companies you should be gunning for: GeekyAnts GeekyAnts is a known name in the industry and has always been on top of the newest technologies in the market with Svelte being no exception. They have not only developed expertise in Svelte and are offering services but are also doing their bit to promote the community with their meetup group. Osiz Technologies This company based in Tamil Nadu, India has the largest list of services I have personally seen from any company. They offer development services in Svelte, Blockchain, Magento, Wordpress and plenty more. Do check them out here. EmployCoder Another service based company from Tamil Nadu, India and founded in 2010, they have expert developers in Svelte and offer services for web development in it, along with many other technologies. Reach them here. These are the names that I could find online and might not be the only ones out there. If you know about more companies that offer Svelte services, do leave the names and links in the comments section. Note: Conclusion Svelte has barged its way to usher in the modern era of front-end development and is not going to budge anytime soon. Although the industry is a little behind on cashing in on the benefits of this technology, that won’t be the case for long. The community for Svelte is growing and is being fore-fronted by some that deserve applause. I would encourage you to dip your feet in orange tinted waters for an experience that will blow you away. groups Learn Svelte From The Masters: https://svelte.dev/tutorial/basics SB Dashboard In Svelte: https://dev.to/geeksrishti/building-a-dashboard-in-svelte-2fkp Marketplace for Free Themes in Svelte: http://startsvelte.com/ Until then… Godspeed.

The Svelte Effect: Everything You Need To Know

Best of the best! Experts in Flutter around the globe! 2019 is in its second month and the era of mobile application technology is continuously reaching new peaks. In the midst of the power struggle between companies to take hold of this division, has made its mark by releasing its own open-source SDK for app development. Google was announced in its alpha stage in May 2017 and towards the end of 2018, Google announced the first stable release of its brainchild at the annual Flutter conference in December. Flutter has proved to be a revolution in the Mobile application development scene with its intuitive design and cross-platform developmental features. Removing the need for JavaScript bridges for communication and it has become one of the fastest frameworks to be adopted by companies and organisations worldwide. Flutter Largely based on a close research in expertise, contributions and community involvement, here is a comprehensible list of the top 10 companies that are experts in Flutter worldwide: 1. GeekyAnts Founded in 2006, is a technology centered company based in Bangalore, India and London, UK. A close mix of services and products based organisation, GeekyAnts hold great expertise in React Native, React, Flutter, AngularJS, NodeJS PHP et cetera. GeekyAnts They are one of the earliest adopters of Flutter, experimenting with it since its early release and have also written a part of the official documentation for it. Their work has also been recognized by the core Flutter team at Google and they have been registered service suppliers for Google LLC since 2017. They also have a major presence in many Flutter community events hosted across the globe and have their own Flutter . Marketplace They have built products like (open-source venture with over 11,000 stars on GitHub) which is a UI components Library for React Native and (proprietary) which is a design tool that codes React Native for you. They have also built starter kits, themes and animations which are hosted on their own marketplaces and are available for purchase. NativeBase BuilderX With an equal focus on mobile development, web development and UI/UX design, they have worked with and for countless clients around the globe and provide a wide array of services. Their clients range from Tech Giants to startups and individual clients as well. Visit them at- https://geekyants.com/ 2. Yakka Founded in 2003, , formerly known as Posse, is an organisation based in New York, NY. They center their services around Flutter and React, creating mobile experiences for brands around the globe. They specialize in Android and iOS development. They have also been contributors to Flutter in the community. Their claim to fame is following a strategic, design-driven and deeply collaborative service provision to clients and ship Flutter as the fastest way to ship mobile apps. Yakka Visit them at- https://theyakka.com/ 3. Droids On Roids Started in 2011, has quickly gained momentum as a world-class service provider for mobile and web app development in Poland. With a plethora of awards and recognition, and a major focus on mobile development, they offer services like native iOS and android development, with their mobile SDK expertise being in Flutter. Droids On Roids With offices in Ruska, PL, London, UK and San Fransisco, USA, they have partnered with big names in Technology and provided state-of-the-art services. They are the work-force behind apps like loop, LiveChat and GiphyCam. Visit them at- https://www.thedroidsonroids.com/ 4. Appinventiv Headquartered in Manhattan, NY, Appinventiv focuses on delivering futuristic solutions in mobile, UI/UX design and software engineering. The mobile application development team at WillowTree specialize in React Native and Flutter for cross platform development and native iOS and Android platforms. They have created applications like et cetera. Domino’s, Vime Visit them at- https://appinventiv.com/ 5. BrainMobi is a consultation, design and development firm based in Noida, India. Founded in 2015, they focus their services on next generation mobile solutions, SME’s and consultations for mobile app development and web development. BrainMobi They have adopted Flutter and have a designated team of Flutter experts at their beck and call. Along with mobile app development, they are also involved in gaming app development in Unity, web solutions and progressive web solutions. They are also experts in cloud computing and AWS. They have offices in the USA, UK, Germany, India and Qatar. Visit them at- https://www.brainmobi.com/ 6. Intelivita A company originating in the UK in 2015, has since then strived to be the best company for mobile application development and web app development in the UK. has a large service record of Flutter development, AR and VR development and Game development for Mobile. Intelivita Intelivita With their offices in the UK and India, is continuously growing its reach with its global clientele while delivering high quality solutions and continuously inventing new things on the fly. Intelivita Visit them at- https://www.intelivita.co.uk/ 7. Singsys in an established name in the mobile app development scene in Singapore since 2009. A fast growing company that offers mobile application solutions in Android and iOS with WWDC trained iOS experts, Magneto certified developers and ISTQB certified QA teams. Singsys Located in Singapore and India, their primary focus in mobile development is on Xamarin, React Native, Windows and Flutter. They have served over 2000 clients worldwide and are also setting their footing in IoT. Visit them at- https://www.singsys.com/ 8. XongoLab is an organization based out of Ahmedabad, India that is involved in Mobile App and e-commerce, CMS solutions, Website development and JS development. They build hybrid apps, iOS, Android and Windows apps. XongoLab They have built some apps in Flutter which are renowned in app stores across platforms. This company was started in 2011 and still continue to grow its service platforms. Visit them at- https://www.xongolab.com/ 9. Netguru Founded in 2008 and with 9 years of industry experience, are making their name in the mobile app development and web development with over 80 satisfied clients and 200+ projects successfully completed. Situated in Poznan, Poland, is continuing to spread its wings and be a bonafide Flutter development company. Netguru Netguru Visit them at- https://www.netguru.com/ 10. Bacancy Tech. Starting from 2011, , based in Ahmedabad, India, has been a leader in handling technological projects involving Ruby on Rails. They have worked in a wide array of domains such as Healthcare, Real Estate, Logistics et cetera. Bacancy Tech. They have extensive knowledge of MVC and have helped many startups on their feet. Amongst their many services, they have recently started using Flutter for mobile application development and have built quite a portfolio for their name. Visit them at- https://www.bacancytechnology.com/ So, here are the crème de la crème of the companies adopting Flutter in 2019. Know that these are ranked such in my opinion and mine only. It’s always great to see new people adopting new technologies and making the community richer and more knowledgeable. Until next time… Godspeed!

Top 10 Flutter Companies in 2019

There exist on of already. Even without articles attached to them. This goes for every language, a testament to how much performance matters to some people. various articles benchmarks serializers various github projects exist However, it’s incredibly hard to create reproducible, consistent benchmarks. That’s not so surprising, as points out, there are many factors to control for: Hanselman CPU Affinity/Process Priority Other running processes on your test machine If present, handle Garbage Collection without skewing results Using the correct time measuring calls Using the frameworks/libraries under test properly Taking result outliers into account Displaying the results in an easy to interpret way And probably some other factors that I’ve missed. It’s no surprise then that many existing benchmarks can be criticised for missing one or more of these points. Let’s take a look at some: GLD.SerializerBenchmark Even though it’s been superseded by I wanted to give it some attention because it illustrates a lot of oversights even though on first glance it seems to be a valuable source of information. serbench, The first thing you notice with GLD.SerializerBenchmark is a build error: This apparently needs a manual DLL download as described by a . Fixing that, don’t forget to input “100” as a program argument, as is stated in the . This produces the following output: comment in the code article Full output here As you can see, not all tests run succesfully. There are plenty of exceptions and checks that are failing, making comparison between other benchmarks, even its own, harder. Not to mention that the article hasn’t given the full output to compare against. Aside from problems running it, there are a couple of measuring problems I noticed: It doesn’t set CPU Affinity not Process Priority In the , the options that can be given a default like done . Jil Serializer here Also in the constructing a StreamWriter is not necessary, but supported in case you need it for something like WebAPI Jil Serializer, Even though the contains an overridable Initialize member, it’s actually never overriden and during the serialize call. Serializers such as Jil use heavy reflection, but only on the first call, making the initiliaze function crucial to get proper results. parent class sometimes even used contains an unnecessary extra StringWriter NetJSON Serializer The Garbage Collecter between every test run, leading to possible garbage collections during crucial code execution. isn’t run All results are averaged, making it impossible to see what the minimum and maximum values were, nor is it obvious how many tests fell within a certain range (i.e. to see how much jitter there is) There has been a lot of work to add a lot, though not all, Serializers used in the .NET environment. But I wouldn’t trust this benchmark to output very consistent measurements. Serbench GLD.SerializerBenchmark’s README points to this project. However, at the time of writing, some of the shortcomings of the GLD project appear to also exist in Serbench. The contains the same unnecessary stringreader/writer, Jil is still not initialized properly and CPU Affinity and Process Priority are not set. Jil Serializer It does seem to have as well as having removed the duplicate StringWriter and giving Jil a new Options object every run as well as adding the Apolyton.FastJson reference directly in the repository. Despite that, there is no mention of having done a Memory Profile to ascertain if collection is done exclusively induced or that it happens during test runs. Also, serbench upon which to run all the tests, which strikes me as odd. collect the garbage before every run creates an extra thread However, I couldn’t get serbench to work. Apparently it requires something called , which is capable of writing the results into a variety of outputs, such as an RDBMS. It seems they’re aiming for a benchmark that emulates running serializers in parallel, supposedly making it more real-life than the synthetic benchmarks usually shown. While chain-benchmarking would certainly be interesting, I’m quite skeptical as to what they’re trying to prove. Isolating serializers in synthetic benchmarks makes them easily comparable, but once you introduce a whole chain of software stacks, you’re bound to run into the issue that everyone has their own combination. Soon, you’ll have to create an all-encompassing benchmark suite that runs on multiple platforms, has pluggable frameworks and pluggable serializers. NFX Admittedly, I did not spend too much time getting it to work, but I do expect being able to open the project and press start and it should work. I hope they’ll make it easier to use in the future. SimpleSpeedTest While not a complete benchmark for a vast array of serializers, it provides a relatively easy setup to create one. shows how to use it, and in it you can see that it doesn’t have the smaller oversights found in the GLD and serbench projects. It only uses streams where necessary, though doesn’t compare the same library with and without streams. It also does but like GLD, it averages all the . One of the examples garbage collection, results into one number While the results will be reasonably trustworthy, here too, I am missing CPU Affinity and Process Priority. I can see this working for a quick one-on-one comparison, but not for a full benchmark suite. A Better Comparison? I’m sure I’ve not looked at all possible benchmark software for serializers in the .NET environment, my time is limited after all. However, I did which aims to account for as many factors as possible, for a wide variety of serializers, in an isolated, synthetic benchmark style. create a project Hardware & Software As is usual in proper benchmarks, to minimize variance and increase reproducability, one states the used hardware and software. As you can see in these screenshots, I run all tests on a non-overclocked i5–4570 With 8 GB of RAM at the following clock/timings. As for the software, I’m running a 64-bit Windows 10 Professional, with the latest updates, all applications except file explorer closed, but with automatic updates and all privacy sensitive settings disabled. I noticed that automatic updates easily takes up all your disk I/O and one whole CPU core while downloading and installing updates in the background. This would not be viable for a benchmark. I’ve used Visual Studio 2017 (not an update version) with .NET Framework 4.6.2 to compile the C# solution. For used libraries in C# see the . packages.config For NodeJS I used version 7.7.4 For C++ I used Visual Studio 2017 (not an update version) with Cereal 1.2.2 (which uses rapidjson and rapidxml), protobuf 3.2.0 (static library can be ) found on the repository Methodology What most other benchmarks do, is create a couple of objects to serialize and deserialize, run those a number of times in a row and calculate the average. While this gives you a representation of total time required, it does lose some valuable data. For this project, I want to create a moderately large object, measure serialization and deserialization separately and store each single run in a list of measurements. This way I can create an . However, I’m going to alter the definition of the various points. High and low will be the highest time and lowest time measured respectively, but the open point will be the 20/100th measurement and the close point will be the 80/100th measurement. OHLC graph On the left you can see an example with 250 repetitions. The fastest sample(L for Low) is 2117 µs, the slowest sample(H for High) is 2888 µs. All measurements are sorted from lowest to fastest. The 20/100th measurement(O) is measurement #50, which is 2117 µs the 80/100th measurement(C) is measurement #200, which is 2302 µs. You can see that most of the samples (60% of them) are in the 2117–2302 µs range, with only a couple of outliers below that but more outliers above that. This way, you have information about how jittery/consistent the library is as well as having a general idea how the library will perform. Further, all benchmark processes will be run on CPU #0 (so CPU affinity is set), having Process Priority High and will be run as administrator, so that the previous two settings will be possible to do by the process itself. As a last step, I’ll profile the memory to see if garbage collections are strictly occurring when I want them to and not during a test. My first test will be Jil in various setups (normal, streaming, with and without attributes on the data object class, with and without options) on x86 and x64. My second test will be a few JSON serializers in C# on x86 and x64. Third test will be a few binary serializers in C# on x86 and x64. My third test will be comparing a couple of serializers in C# to ones in C++ and NodeJS. Code Just to make sure I’ve done it correctly, I’d like to run you through some of my code. First thing the program does is set Affinity and Priority. Full code here This is the code used to run a single measurement. .NET 4.6 introduces the GC.TryStartNoGCRegion function, which allows you to tell the garbage collector to pre-allocate memory and tell it to try and not run garbage collection until you end the region. I try to before calling the action. allocate 1M Full code here Each test is warmed up, so we don’t measure cold startup time. Then the tests are run for 250 repetitions, which is . Technically, this is the only “measurement” that is thrown out for all tests. hard-coded Full code here For all tests, I create an object with 1000 documents. I tried to give a representative object, containing datetimes, UTF-8 strings and an integer. I realise that many more combinations are possible, but I’m not sure if they would add much. Of course, there are some variations of the specific action, such as when streams are required or when a specific file with preloaded json/xml/binary contents are read into memory before running the test, or when a different type of Person/Document is required for the library, but this is the basic structure for all types. Results — Test #1 Click for bigger view. Ser = Serialization test, Des = Deserialization test, StrSer = Stream Serialization, StrDes = Stream Deserialization, x86 run, be aware of the Y-axis not starting at 0 Click for bigger view. Ser = Serialization test, Des = Deserialization test, StrSer = Stream Serialization, StrDes = Stream Deserialization, x64 run, be aware of the Y-axis not starting at 0 I apologise for not letting the Y-axis start at 0, I am using and I have yet to find out how to change that. If you know how, let me know! Live Charts, The first thing you see in these graphs is that Jil is fast and consistent, especially for a JSON serializer. Most of the calls are under 1 ms. The consistency is probably due to being fast, as we’ll see in the next tests. Second, stream serialization slows it down, but stringwriter apparently speeds it up. Third, the “With Attributes” means that the data object was created with DataContract and Serializable attributes on the class. But what actually happens is that Jil is unable to recognize some of the DataContract attributes, which leads to datetimes not being serialized/deserialized. So the speedup you see in the graph is completely attributed to that. Lastly, deserialization with streams is a lot slower than without, which is a shame. When using Jil with WebAPI, the stream API is used instead of the direct version. The profile will be at the end, since all of the results are from one run of the benchmark. Results — Test #2 Click for bigger view. Ser = Serialization test, Des = Deserialization test, StrSer = Stream Serialization, StrDes = Stream Deserialization, x86 run, be aware of the Y-axis not starting at 0 Click for bigger view. Ser = Serialization test, Des = Deserialization test, StrSer = Stream Serialization, StrDes = Stream Deserialization, x64 run, be aware of the Y-axis not starting at 0 This is where it starts to get interesting! One of the findings of GLD.SerializerBenchmark was that NetJSON was faster than Jil — but not in this benchmark! Except for x64 serialization, Jil is faster by a pretty noticable margin. And even in the x64 serialization case, NetJSON is ~75 µs faster, whereas with x64 deserialization NetJSON is 374 µs slower per call. NewtonSoft.JSON is 2–3x as slow as either Jil and NetJSON, but the real slowpoke is the DataContractJsonSerializer deserializer, which comes with the .NET framework. It is about 6–8x times slower than Jil and NetJSON as well as being the least consistent of every framework. I have no explanation as to why though. Results — Test #3 Click for bigger view. Ser = Serialization test, Des = Deserialization test, StrSer = Stream Serialization, StrDes = Stream Deserialization, x86 run, be aware of the Y-axis not starting at 0 Click for bigger view. Ser = Serialization test, Des = Deserialization test, StrSer = Stream Serialization, StrDes = Stream Deserialization, x64 run, be aware of the Y-axis not starting at 0 As I had expected, binary serializers can be even faster than JSON serializers. They don’t have to parse text, after all. But what I was really surprised about was that ZeroFormatter was so incredibly fast. Its bold claims on are indeed no lie. It’s faster than Hyperion (the successor to Wire) and protobuf. github If you compare Hyperion or Protobuf to Jil or NetJSON you won’t find much speed difference — in C# at least. MsgPack is a bit slower but you really want to steer clear of BinaryFormatter. Results — Test #4 Click for bigger view. Ser = Serialization test, Des = Deserialization test, StrSer = Stream Serialization, StrDes = Stream Deserialization, C++ x64 run, be aware of the Y-axis not starting at 0 Click for bigger view. Ser = Serialization test, Des = Deserialization test, StrSer = Stream Serialization, StrDes = Stream Deserialization, c++ x64 run Click for bigger view. Ser = Serialization test, Des = Deserialization test, StrSer = Stream Serialization, StrDes = Stream Deserialization, nodejs x64 run, be aware of the Y-axis not starting at 0 These last three graphs are about serializers in C++, C++ and Node.JS respectively. What’s interesting about the first graph is that I had expected JSON and XML serialization in C++ to be faster than in C#. But somehow, cereal JSON serialization is as slow as DataContractJsonSerializer deserialization. The deserialization is incredibly fast though. I’m not sure if I found a performance bug or if I did something wrong. That’s why in the second graph, I removed JSON and XML, and I find that Protobuf is indeed faster in C++. More importantly though, since C++ does not have extra garbage collection metrics, the results are incredibly consistent. The second graph might make it look like it’s equally jittery as C#, but it’s actually all within a few hundred µs. The third and last graph are the results of a couple of Node.JS serializers. Of course the default one and a couple that claim to be faster. The thing though, I think I might be dealing with some problems getting an accurate time in js. Node.JS supports hrtime, which should be accurate, but still my results are all over the place. I’m not sure if I could call the Node.JS benchmark accurate. Results —Profiling To be sure that my C# benchmarks were not hindered by garbage collection, I did a memory profile. Garbage Collection Garbage Collection As you can see, garbage collection only happens when GC.Collect() is called. CPU Profile In the CPU profile, most of the time is spent in some P/Invoke stuff. I’m hazarding a guess that it’s the Garbage Collector stuff I’m doing, since a GC.Collect every 4 milliseconds does add up. Otherwise, the CPU time goes to the serialization libraries. Raw measurements can be found here: , , and . C# x86 C# x64 C++ Node.JS Conclusion In this (rather long) article, I have shown that most benchmarks miss some steps when doing measurements, that doing measurements correctly is hard and that binary serialization definitely is faster than JSON serialization. While I have undoubtedly not tested with a data object that is like whatever you’re going to use in your software, I think it’s safe to say that Jil and NetJSON are the fastest JSON serializers I tested for C# and ZeroFormatter definitely is the fastest binary serializer I tested. But if you really, REALLY want every ounce of performance, you still have to use C++, or other statically compiled languages. If you’ve stuck with me this far — thank you for reading! I hope you had as much fun reading as I had making this. If you have any questions, don’t hestitate to ask.

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