在 Java 中使用序列化实现克隆方法是一种好习惯吗？

Question

I saw several tutorials online where serialization and subsequent deserialization is used to implement deep cloning in Java. My feeling is, that this is a solution that is fast to implement and therefore widespread but might have caveats that I currently don't see.

Is that way of implementing clone() good style? Isn't it slow? Should deep cloning really be done that way? What better ways exist?

Answer 1

Is it good practice in Java to implement the clone method using serialization?

If you use serialization to clone an object you have to necessarily unserialize the serialized object to create the cloned object. It makes two operations where the second seems be an overhead as it should not be performed if you implement the cloning operation at the hand or with a mapper API (ex: SpringBean, Common apache, ModelMapper, Dozzer...).
So it has without no doubt an impact on the performance. If you do this processing very occasionally, I don't think that it should be a problem (even if it seems to be a useless overhead and you have alternative ways) but if you use it often I think that it may have a cost.

Besides, why implementing Clonable to clone an object by using serialization instead of forgetting Cloneable that is a clumsy API and using directly the deserialization mechanism ?