7 ms·

I didn't know CBOR, but it looks similar to BSON and MessagePack, or is there a significant difference?

by pagnol 9y ago

heavenlyhash 9y ago
Roughly that it isn't shit. I say that a bit tongue in cheek, but really: BSON has a monstrous amount of basic data types, some of which make very little sense and are very difficult to round-trip through other formats; and MessagePack had crippling basic sanity issues with what-are-bytes-vs-strings in its early history and that's something you simply can't recover from without declaring game over and making a new spec. CBOR has neither of these issues. It's almost completely isomorphic to json, plus supports byte arrays. It's very nice.
- roller 9y ago
  In the feature category, I'd also mention direct support for unbounded collections. CBOR can be its own container format for streaming data.
- zbentley 9y ago
  Does CBOR support lazy/partial deserialization? It's not a make-or-break feature, but the ability to pluck out individual fields from large MessagePack documents without deserializing the whole thing has been a significant performance/memory savings for me many times. I haven't played with flatbuffers, but it probably supports this as well, given its design. Are there other binary protocols that have first-class (i.e. present with a good API in the client libraries for all major languages) support for lazy/partial deserialization?
  - js8 9y ago
    CBOR is very similar to MsgPack, so yes (if you design the schema well enough).
- ci5er 9y ago
  Is/Can CBOR be canonicalized (like ASN.1, for example) for the purpose of unambiguous generation and interpretation of hashes? EDIT: I am happy to see that it handles date-time. Not really my favorite part of the non-spec of JSON on that front...
  - heavenlyhash 9y ago
    You might be interested in IPLD in particular: https://ipld.io/ https://ipld.io/ They use CBOR as the underlying serialization, and have a deep interest in canonicalization and applications of hashing.
- RantyDave 9y ago
  More cbor ranting... In Python you can replace json.loads/dumps with cbor.loads/dumps with no further changes. Going back again may prove to be an issue when you discover just how much it is that json can't do.

I didn't know CBOR, but it looks similar to BSON and MessagePack, or is there a significant difference?

by pagnol 9y ago

I didn't know CBOR, but it looks similar to BSON and MessagePack, or is there a significant difference?

Roughly that it isn't shit. I say that a bit tongue in cheek, but really: BSON has a monstrous amount of basic data types, some of which make very little sense and are very difficult to round-trip through other formats; and MessagePack had crippling basic sanity issues with what-are-bytes-vs-strings in its early history and that's something you simply can't recover from without declaring game over and making a new spec. CBOR has neither of these issues. It's almost completely isomorphic to json, plus supports byte arrays. It's very nice.

roller 9y ago
In the feature category, I'd also mention direct support for unbounded collections. CBOR can be its own container format for streaming data.
zbentley 9y ago
Does CBOR support lazy/partial deserialization? It's not a make-or-break feature, but the ability to pluck out individual fields from large MessagePack documents without deserializing the whole thing has been a significant performance/memory savings for me many times. I haven't played with flatbuffers, but it probably supports this as well, given its design. Are there other binary protocols that have first-class (i.e. present with a good API in the client libraries for all major languages) support for lazy/partial deserialization?
- js8 9y ago
  CBOR is very similar to MsgPack, so yes (if you design the schema well enough).
ci5er 9y ago
Is/Can CBOR be canonicalized (like ASN.1, for example) for the purpose of unambiguous generation and interpretation of hashes? EDIT: I am happy to see that it handles date-time. Not really my favorite part of the non-spec of JSON on that front...
- heavenlyhash 9y ago
  You might be interested in IPLD in particular: https://ipld.io/ https://ipld.io/ They use CBOR as the underlying serialization, and have a deep interest in canonicalization and applications of hashing.
RantyDave 9y ago
More cbor ranting... In Python you can replace json.loads/dumps with cbor.loads/dumps with no further changes. Going back again may prove to be an issue when you discover just how much it is that json can't do.