avsc

Not totally sure what BaseX is, how it compares versus Base64, especially post HTTP deflate compressions, but I'm not sure I like it. I'm pretty sure this kind of exercise is better left out, and that everyone should just use zstd on whatever encoding so as to decouple problem domains. Round two of skepticism: msgpack is a niche player with no clear big corporate sponsor. Protobufs, flatbufs, and thrift are all actively making faster better quicker implementations, but I can not off the top of my head think of any major msgpack lovers. Avro also seems to just generally have some fast impls already, especially on platforms I care about[1], so credit there too. I ought review, but out of hand I can't think of anything distinguishing about msgpack. Definitely nice having some alternative to Salmon protocol[2] (as in Buzz, OStatus) on hand. A

Thanks! I like to think of Avro in two (related) parts: + A very compact binary serialization, which lets you efficiently store or transfer data over the wire. (Avro actually also defines a way to encode your data as JSON in cases when you need a human-readable representation.) + A way to define "data types". For example this schema [1] defines what we expect a "Human" entry to look like, and we can now do things like check whether we are missing any information, make sure all fields are valid, sort, efficiently copy objects, etc. This is glossing over many things (files, RPC, ...) but I hope this helps a bit! You can find a lot more information in the official Avro documentation [2] if you're curious. [1] https://github.com/mtth/avsc/blob/master/etc/benchmarks/sche... [2] https://avro.apache.org/docs/current/index.html