> It would also be really nice to migrate to textual representations of data > structures as opposed to binary ones. The most successful internet > standards are based on text.
There are lots of successful binary protocols: TCP, IP, PNG, JPEG, MP3, DNS, SSH, SSL, the Bitcoin protocol itself. What's more some other protocols that are text based have suffered serious problems due to that choice. Witness the absurd design of SMTP that means you can't start a paragraph with the word From because that's a new-message marker! Or the fact that file attachments grow by 33% when you send them. Or the various exploits that can exist in web servers thanks to header splitting attacks. Trying to represent something binary as text doesn't make any sense. If you look at these data structures they consist of keys, signatures, hashes, certificates and other fundamentally binary things. You'd just end up base64 encoding everything anyway, at which point all you've done is design an inefficient binary protocol that masquerades as text. The disadvantages of both with the advantages of neither. Protocol buffers have a text form that you can print to and parse from, if you so wish, though I only normally see people use that support for debug prints and sometimes because they want to load hand-written config files directly into protobuf generated objects. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep yourself connected to Go Parallel: BUILD Helping you discover the best ways to construct your parallel projects. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
