Can anyone clarify whether `ByteArray`s are currently serialized efficiently to CBOR format?

# serialization

[Ian]

Can anyone clarify whether `ByteArray`s are currently serialized efficiently to CBOR format?

[Dominaezzz]

Are you talking about this? https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization/pull/898

[Ian]

I'm not sure. I guess I'm asking whether a ByteArray will be serialized to raw bytes of the same length, or close to it?

[Paul Woitaschek]

Just try it out, its really easy to setup an intellij sample project and play with it

[travis]

My understanding is that ByteArray is serialized as type 4 CBOR byte-by-byte (so seemingly sub-optimal, but I haven't benchmarked to confirm).

Not sure why that design choice, possibly because in the future they want to support serializing from an unknown length stream of data?

PR #898 adds CBOR type 2 serialization of ByteArray and serializes the entire ByteArray in a single pass (similar to how String is serialized).

[travis]

I guess I'm asking whether a ByteArray will be serialized to raw bytes of the same length, or close to it?

Could've just been the data used, but in PR 898, it seems type 4 can sometimes take up more bytes than type 2.

e.g. 0xCAFE serialized to 0x383521 for type 4 (default type for kotlinx.serialization) and 0xCAFE serialized to 0xCAFE for type 2.

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization/pull/898#discussion_r452625386