TStsujp·Jul 22, 2022Submission
Binn – a compact, fast, and easy to use binary data serialization format
2 points · Open discussionliteserver
binn
C2016–2022
liteserver / binn
binn
Binary Serialization
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
481GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Binary Serialization
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-02-17 06:07:01 UTC to 2022-07-22 12:42:23 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesBinn also does binary length prefixing of all values, allowing you to skip through it. It's also a lot simpler than Amazon Ion and doesn't have the awful mistakes of BSON so it might do the trick for you. It's not at all popular though.
https://github.com/liteserver/binn
The reason most formats don't length-prefix everything is because it makes it costly to encode in both time and space. You have to basically encode a message inside-out to calculate the nested sizes of everything. This is going to be hugely slow and memory-intensive if you're encoding a 10 GB file, and it's useless for messages on the scale of kilobytes so there isn't any point. MessagePack on the other hand can be encoded in one pass from start to finish as long as you know the element counts of your maps and arrays beforehand.
> storing numbers in big endian format (why
Read the rest
?)
Embedded processors tended to be big-endian, like older PowerPC and older ARM. These formats are designed for embedded so it (probably?) improved performance on those processors. This is less true now since virtually all modern ARM processors and probably most other embedded processors now run in little-endian mode.
Ultimately what it comes down to is that these formats are designed for the opposite of your use case. I don't know what you're using a 10 GB JSON file for but there must be a better storage solution for you than a schemaless serialization format.
Easy Binary Serialization for C
1 points · Open discussion