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> Binary protocols ARE easier than JSON. I'm counting everything involved in handling JSON, and you may not be; Lexing, parsing, and so on. Those things simply

> Binary protocols ARE easier than JSON. I'm counting everything involved in handling JSON, and you may not be; Lexing, parsing, and so on. Those things simply don't exist in binary. they add weight to code that simply doesn't need to be there if you're using a binary protocol. You're describing easier for a computer, which isn't really relevant. For a developer, parsing JSON is clearly easier than parsing a binary format. For effectively every major language nowadays, it's a single function call, and you're done, it's hard to beat that. In practice, sending & parsing JSON instead of a binary format is not going to make your debugging experience here any _noticeably_ slower (if you have a DAP case where it does, I'd love to see it) and it is going to make development quicker & easier, and make the traffic inflight easier to debug too. It's a tradeoff of course, but for most cases it's worthwhile.

naikrovek 7y ago
> You're describing easier for a computer, which isn't really relevant. For a developer, parsing JSON is clearly easier than parsing a binary format. For effectively every major language nowadays, it's a single function call, and you're done, it's hard to beat that. If you're talking about the ability of the human eye and brain to see the binary format and understand it, then yes. JSON is pre-humanized. I would say that it's pretty easy to write a visualizer for binary data if you know the format, and I would add that the time taken to write that visualizer is trivial compared to the execution time saved by using a binary file or protocol over JSON over even a short period of time. > In practice, sending & parsing JSON instead of a binary format is not going to make your debugging experience here any _noticeably_ slower (if you have a DAP case where it does, I'd love to see it) and it is going to make development quicker & easier, and make the traffic inflight easier to debug too. Debugging performance of a debugger is orders of magnitude larger than the time saved by using a binary file/format, you're right. That's a problem with debuggers, not with binary data storage. > It's a tradeoff of course, but for most cases it's worthwhile. Yeah for many cases JSON is a fine choice. For a protocol that goes between a computer program and another computer program (such as the IDE and the debugger process, as in the use case of the Debug Adapter Protocol) it is a bad choice. It's necessarily slower and more wasteful of bandwidth and CPU time than a binary protocol would have been. Debuggers are slow enough, they don't need to be made slower by using JSON.

naikrovek 7y ago

> You're describing easier for a computer, which isn't really relevant. For a developer, parsing JSON is clearly easier than parsing a binary format. For effectively every major language nowadays, it's a single function call, and you're done, it's hard to beat that. If you're talking about the ability of the human eye and brain to see the binary format and understand it, then yes. JSON is pre-humanized. I would say that it's pretty easy to write a visualizer for binary data if you know the format, and I would add that the time taken to write that visualizer is trivial compared to the execution time saved by using a binary file or protocol over JSON over even a short period of time. > In practice, sending & parsing JSON instead of a binary format is not going to make your debugging experience here any _noticeably_ slower (if you have a DAP case where it does, I'd love to see it) and it is going to make development quicker & easier, and make the traffic inflight easier to debug too. Debugging performance of a debugger is orders of magnitude larger than the time saved by using a binary file/format, you're right. That's a problem with debuggers, not with binary data storage. > It's a tradeoff of course, but for most cases it's worthwhile. Yeah for many cases JSON is a fine choice. For a protocol that goes between a computer program and another computer program (such as the IDE and the debugger process, as in the use case of the Debug Adapter Protocol) it is a bad choice. It's necessarily slower and more wasteful of bandwidth and CPU time than a binary protocol would have been. Debuggers are slow enough, they don't need to be made slower by using JSON.