The format of serialized objects is not documented. It partially depends on the implementation-defined platform and the C++ ABI. As such, serialization is not really suitable for long term object persistance, since a platform change or a compiler change may result in incompatibility with previously-serialized objects. The intent of this serialization implementation is interprocess communication between version-compatible client and server processes.

Serialized byte sequences include a signature of the serialized object. Attempting to deserialize into an incompatible object results in a well-defined error path, a thrown exception.