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-rw-r--r--README.md60
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@@ -2,8 +2,64 @@ Serd
====
Serd is a lightweight C library for RDF syntax which supports reading and
-writing Turtle, NTriples, TriG, and NQuads.
-For more information, see <http://drobilla.net/software/serd>.
+writing [Turtle][], [TriG][], [NTriples][], and [NQuads][]. Serd is suitable
+for performance-critical or resource-limited applications, such as serialising
+very large data sets or embedded systems.
+
+Features
+--------
+
+ * **Free:** Serd is [Free Software][] released under the extremely liberal
+ [ISC license][].
+
+ * **Portable and Dependency-Free:** Serd has no external dependencies other
+ than the C standard library. It is known to compile with GCC, Clang, and
+ MSVC (as C++), and is tested on GNU/Linux, MacOS, and Windows.
+
+ * **Small:** Serd is implemented in a few thousand lines of C. It typically
+ compiles to about 100 KiB, or about 50 KiB stripped with size optimizations.
+
+ * **Fast and Lightweight:** Serd can stream abbreviated Turtle, unlike many
+ tools which must first build an internal model. This makes it particularly
+ useful for writing very large data sets, since it can do so using only a
+ small amount of memory. Serd is, to the author's knowledge, the fastest
+ Turtle reader/writer by a wide margin (see [Performance](#performance)
+ below).
+
+ * **Conformant and Well-Tested:** Serd passes all tests in the Turtle and TriG
+ test suites, correctly handles all "normal" examples in the URI
+ specification, and includes many additional tests which were written
+ manually or discovered with fuzz testing. The test suite is run
+ continuously on many platforms, has 100% code coverage by line, and runs
+ with zero memory errors or leaks.
+
+Performance
+-----------
+
+The benchmarks below compare `serdi`, [rapper][], and [riot][] re-serialising
+Turtle data generated by [sp2b][] on an i7-4980HQ running Debian 9. Of the
+three, `serdi` is the fastest by a wide margin, and the only one that uses a
+constant amount of memory (a single page) for all input sizes.
+
+![Time](http://drobilla.gitlab.io/serd/images/serdi-time.svg)
+![Throughput](http://drobilla.gitlab.io/serd/images/serdi-throughput.svg)
+![Memory](http://drobilla.gitlab.io/serd/images/serdi-memory.svg)
+
+Documentation
+-------------
+
+ * [API reference](https://drobilla.gitlab.io/serd/doc/html/index.html)
+ * [Test coverage report](https://drobilla.gitlab.io/serd/coverage/index.html)
+ * [`serdi` man page](https://drobilla.gitlab.io/serd/man/serdi.html)
-- David Robillard <d@drobilla.net>
+[Turtle]: https://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/
+[TriG]: https://www.w3.org/TR/trig/
+[NTriples]: https://www.w3.org/TR/n-triples/
+[NQuads]: https://www.w3.org/TR/n-quads/
+[Free Software]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
+[ISC license]: http://opensource.org/licenses/isc
+[rapper]: http://librdf.org/raptor/
+[riot]: https://jena.apache.org/
+[sp2b]: http://www2.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~mschmidt/docs/sp2b.pdf