Ooh, I just found scroll which looks really promising.
@leudz Any thoughts on it. It looks like we could store custom components in a Vec<u8> and then use scroll to read and write the custom bytes to/from it.
Edit: actually maybe I'm just shooting in the dark again without fully understanding the needs for the project. 
I think I'm jumping the gun a little. I'll probably come back to this once I understand the problem a little better.