When you use RandomAccessFile API in JVM one of the flags allows you to mmap the contents

        try (RandomAccessFile file = new RandomAccessFile("example.dat", "rw");
             FileChannel channel = file.getChannel()) {
            
            // Map the file into memory from position 0 up to bufferSize
            MappedByteBuffer buffer = channel.map(FileChannel.MapMode.READ_WRITE, 0, bufferSize);

Once you have a mappedbytebuffer you can use MemoryLayout from FFM to view it as structured data without deserializing

Serializing has many uses.

- Memory might not look the same on all platforms, if your app is multi-platform you stop being able to share your data cross-platform.

- The internal data structures of your app will absolutely change as your app evolves, the binary data in memory is a raw result of your data structures. So you have to commit to never changing data structures, or create complicated binary migration tools to update memory when your app updates.

- Debugging corrupted memory is incredibly tedious any sometimes impossible. Having plain text serialized data makes debugging much more straightforward.

Top my my head I would suggest to focus more on improving performance on your serialization pipeline. There might be some subset of your data that is unlikely to ever change and is identical on all platforms, maybe your serializer is hybrid in that case.

So we can share them with each other? Are we going to pass around memory dumps instead? What about tool choice when working on a specific document format?