I thought so.

When I teach I go on an on and on about the greatness of term_to_binary and the inverse. These are incredibly useful.

They are also blindingly fast compared to any JSON/XML type serialisation.

Something like:

defmodule Term do

	def store(anything, path) do
 		bin = :erlang.term_to_binary(anything)
    	File.write!(path, bin)
    end

   	def fetch(path) do
    	File.read!(path) |> :erlang.binary_to_term
    end
end

Should do the trick

The phoenix long poll transport for channels uses term_to_binary to encode the long poll server pid and send it back to the client. When they repoll, we binary_to_term back into a pid to ask the server if it has any messages for us, which has been a fun way to use these features

Are you referring to this: https://griffinbyatt.com/post/analysis-plug-security-vulns? I don’t think deserializing calls any embedded functions, but this blog post shows how they can subsequently be called unintentionally by enumeration.

Using Plug.Crypto.safe_binary_to_term filters out any embedded serialized functions.