How about JSON?

AnsibleUnsafe-notes.rest

@@ -212,3 +212,16 @@ Informed guesses of rules/design principals
 - All templating should/does happen on the controller (80% sure).
 - Ansible targets cannot/should not try to mark a value as safe or unsafe.
   The controller couldn't trust that determination anyway.
+
+Ideas
+-----
+
+Could the current dispatch table/`isinstance()` approach be replaced by a
+roundtrip through JSON? E.g.
+
+.. code::
+
+    def cast(obj):
+        return json.loads(json.dumps(obj))
+
+Would it be faster/slower?