Sometimes its good to have an open community building a ton of alternatives, sometimes it’s not as good. I think this is a place where it hasn’t turned out so good and someone needs to sit down and consolidate it. The summary right now is:
- Julia’s serialization is the best, but cannot necessarily cross versions.
- HDF5 is stable and won’t change, but that means it supports the basics (arrays and such), and that’s pretty much what it will do.
- JLD2 is great and got new maintainers. That might mean it’s the thing to use from now on, but I haven’t tried it since it got the new crew.
- BSON has some architectural issues and is in a maintenance state where it won’t change much.
- JSON is pretty nice if it works for the types you’re using.
- Anything else I wouldn’t consider, or at least, it’s “use at your own risk” levels of maintenance and use by the community.
I’d probably just stick to JLD2 from now on.