Comment by gynvael

I don't think that's fully accurate (full-disclosure: I've done the technical review for this article).

First, as for "serialization" vs "deserialization", it can be argued that the word "serialization" can be used in two ways. One is on the "low level" to denote the specific action of taking the data and serializing it. The other one is "high level", where it's just a bag where you throw in anything related (serialization, deserialization, protocols, etc) - same as it's done on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization (note how the article is not called "Serialization and deserialization" for exactly these reasons). So yes, you can argue that the author could have written "deserialization", but you can also argue that the author used the "high level" interpretation of the word and therefore used it correctly.

As for insertion not happening and balancing stuff - my memory might be failing me, but I do remember it actually happening during serialization. I think there even was a "delete" option when constructing the "serialized buffer", but it had interesting limitations.

Anyway, not sure how deep did you go into how it works (beyond what's in the article), but it's a pretty cool and clever piece of work (and yes, it does have its limitations, but also I can see this having its applications - e.g. when sending data from a more powerful machine to a tiny embedded one).