4 ms·

Why not use something like Protobufs and Cap'n'Proto instead of yet another serialization format?

• kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  They require a schema. A schemaless binary serialization like CBOR or BSON is more amenable to JSON interchange.
  • k__ 10y ago
    How about http://msgpack.org/ http://msgpack.org/?
    • seagreen 10y ago
      Son's a niche tool to allow talking to JSON services in a more consistent way. It's not meant as an competitor to any other data format. EDIT: s/alternative/competitor
• CJefferson 10y ago
  I always find myself finding myself back with JSON. The advantage it can be parsed easily in any language -- everything has a JSON parser.
  • hnbroseph 10y ago
    protobufs are fairly wide spread... from action script to erlang to haskell to visual basic.
    • CJefferson 10y ago
      Last time I tried (6 months ago) I couldn't find a proto3 implementation for Haskell that was complete ( https://github.com/google/proto-lens https://github.com/google/proto-lens doesn't do Any, https://github.com/alphaHeavy/protobuf https://github.com/alphaHeavy/protobuf doesn't do proto3). Maybe one exists, or I could use proto2 and rewrite the other system I was working with. I decided it was easier in my case to just output JSON.
      • seagreen 10y ago
        Dang, `protobuf` doesn't support proto2? I'm kind of a Haskell die-hard, this is a big hole in our ecosystem=(
      • kentonv 10y ago
        You don't really need proto3, though. Proto2 is compatible and proto3 mostly only removes features.