schemaless-benchmarks

I did some pretty extensive benchmarking of various schemaless serialization libraries a few years back. All of these libraries have advanced quite a bit since then so it's a bit out of date, but the relative speeds of MessagePack vs JSON and BSON are probably still relevant: https://github.com/ludocode/schemaless-benchmarks I haven't compared them to schema formats like Protobuf or FlatBuffers yet because the use cases are pretty different. I like MessagePack for small projects or rapid prototyping because you don't need to integrate any big libraries or set up code generation as part of your buildsystem. (Mostly I got sick of integrating the C++ Protobuf library into embedded projects.) The MessagePack format is a lot simpler than Protobuf and the best implementations are nowhere near as allocation-prone as the reference implementation

Because accessing fields in a binary format is a seek() while in a text format it is much more complicated. Try to build a mental model what is required to parse text based formats. You can have a look to results of performance testing involving these binary message formats vs json. http://zderadicka.eu/comparison-of-json-like-serializations-... https://github.com/ludocode/schemaless-benchmarks#speed---de... https://eng.uber.com/trip-data-squeeze/ http://ugorji.net/blog/benchmarking-serialization-in-go