Major Description
I'm throwing this out as something of a strawman JIRA: it's always bugged me how verbose the serialization of TupleWritable et al. are compared to the Avro formats, so I took a crack at changing their underlying serialization to be more compact by doing more things in terms of BytesWritable and using the wrapping MapFns in order to do more of the de-serialization work. Patch is attached, if anyone is interested in this or has an opinion on whether or not this is a good idea, I'd love to hear it. The big pro is that Crunch jobs that have to use writables will run faster as a result, the downside is that it's not backwards compatible and it makes the code more complex.