Cereal versus Binary

Question

The two major competing packages for serializing and deserializing data in Haskell that I am aware of are binary and cereal. When should one choose one of these packages over the other? Or are there other choices that I am neglecting?

Answer 1

They aren't competing, they are complementary. cereal works on strict bytestrings while binary works on lazy. Because of its lazy nature, binary depends on throwing an exception on parse error while cereal can fail via Either.

Also, to imply there are "only" two main packages is a misrepresentation. At the very least you should look at blaze-builder too.