Question

I know what serialization is, but to me, this is one term that does not describe what it means.

Why do we call serialization serialization? What is it about converting objects to raw data (and inflating/deserializing, for that matter) lends itself towards anything that related to the term “serial”? Who coined this term and why?

Answer 1

I think John Saunders is on the right track, the fact that data is sent to disk or over a network as a “stream” is almost certainly the origin of this term.

Another way to think of it, however, is like this: The state of a program is spread all over memory, with pointers/links pointing all over the place. You have arrays, lists, trees, call stacks, heaps of allocated memory, etc., in no particular order.

When you want to save some state, you cannot use much of the information in your program. For example, any pointer values or stack offsets (whether used directly or used internally by the language runtime, etc.) will likely not be valid the next time your program runs because the heap will have been used to allocate slightly different series of memory blocks. Saving these pointer values would be useless.

To save some state, you have to “put your affairs in order” such that the information being saved is only that part that will be relevant later on.