On Sunday, 31 March 2013 at 21:25:48 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
Ok. I'm not familiar with Protocol Buffers.
Well, the basic idea of EXI and similar standards is that you can have 2 types of serialization: built-in when you keep schema in the serialized message - which value belongs to which field (this way you can read and write any data structure) or schema-informed when the serializer knows what data it works with, so it omits schema from the message and e.g. writes two int fields as just consecutive 8 bytes - it knows that these 8 bytes are 2 ints and which field each belongs to; the drawback is that you can't read the message without schema, the advantage is smaller message size and faster serialization.
