Cereal

Serialisation Library for JavaScript that respects object aliases.

Can be used either client-side or in NodeJS.

What does it solve?

$3

var x = {};
var y = {a: x, b: x};

If you take the above and then do JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(y)) then
you will lose the alias to x: what you'll get back will be {a: {},
b: {}}.

If you instead do Cereal.parse(Cereal.stringify(y)) then you'll get
back the correct object shape, with both a and b pointing to the
same object.

$3

JSON can't cope with cyclical data structures. Cereal can.

var x = {};
x.x = x;

JSON will blow up if you try to stringify(x). Cereal will work
correctly.

Anything else?

JSON invokes toJSON on an object before encoding it. Analogously to
this, Cereal invokes invoking a cerealise function if it exists and
encoding what is returned from that.

Note that Cereal first rewrites the object structure to something
without loops or aliases (but from which the loops and aliases can be
reconstructed) and then it just uses normal JSON encoding on the
result. And vice-versa.

As a result, Cereal will ignore everything that JSON would ignore
too. Thus as normal, you lose functions, prototypes etc etc.