It's like JSON. but fast and small.

> MessagePack: It's like JSON. but fast and small and complete. Both are minimal self describing data serialization formats, but JSON is incomplete. It misses a type to represent one of the fundamental type: byte blobs. And also parts of floats. Which means there are a lot inconsistent ways to hack that in e.g. base64 encoded strings. But this means it's loosing partially it's property of being self-describing (same if you allow numbers as strings e.g. "-12"). Just to be…

It looks cool, but be very careful about using it (in a browser, at least). Browsers have super-fast JSON parsers and parsing msgpack is much, much slower than parsing good old JSON. This great comment (from 201 days ago) is exactly about this issue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4091051 I quote a bit of it here: JSON size: 386kb MsgPack size: 332kb Difference: -14% Encoding with JSON.stringify 4 ms Encoding with msgpack.pack 73 ms Difference: 18.25x slower Decoding with JSON.parse 4 ms Decoding with…

I played quite a bit with MessagePack, used it for various things, and I don't like it. My primary gripes are: + The Object and Array needs to be entirely and deep parsed. You cannot skip them. + Object and Array cannot be streamed when writing. They require a 'count' at the beginning, and since the 'count' size can vary in number of bytes, you can't even "walk back" and update it. It would have been MUCH, MUCH better to…

For perl it's fast as long as you have a small payload. Here's my benchmarks using progressively bigger data structures. perl: 5.008008 Storable: 2.21 JSON::XS: 2.25 Data::MessagePack: 0.34 ==== Size ==== .-----------------+-----------+---------+---------. | src | storable | json | msgpack | +-----------------+-----------+---------+---------+ | 1 | 4 | fail | 1 | | 3.14 | 8 | fail | 5 | | {} | 7 | 2 | 1 | | [] | 7 | 2 | 1 | | [('a')x10]…