NBTx VS FlatBuffers

Because for my upcoming Minecraft clone written in C (yes, yet another Minecraft clone) I needed a binary format just like Notch's NBT, but it's very Java-oriented… Big endian only, and lacks unsigned types. So I decided to make my own format fixing that, based on NBT, and called it NBTx because it sounds cool. It's like .doc when it became .docx. My library is a fork of the cNBT library on GitHub. It's beer-ware licensed so feel free to use it in your own projects! Or better yet, contribute to improve it because currently, it is just a largely-untested adaptation of cNBT (although it is not very complex, most likely it works just fine), and seems like it needs an API to make an nbt tree from scratch. Maybe someone can make C# bindings so it can be used in Unity and reach more devs? (I stopped using Unity some time ago.) The specification is in the NBTx.txt file in the repository. Let me know what you think!

I don't work at Cloudflare but follow their work and occasionally work on performance sensitive projects.

If I had to guess, they looked at the landscape a bit like I do and regarded Cap'n Proto, flatbuffers, SBE, etc. as being in one category apart from other data formats like Avro, protobuf, and the like.

So once you're committed to record'ish shaped (rather than columnar like Parquet) data that has an upfront parse time of zero (nominally, there could be marshalling if you transmogrify the field values on read), the list gets pretty short.

https://capnproto.org/news/2014-06-17-capnproto-flatbuffers-... goes into some of the trade-offs here.

Cap'n Proto was originally made for https://sandstorm.io/. That work (which Kenton has presumably done at Cloudflare since he's been employed there) eventually turned into Cloudflare workers.

Another consideration: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/issues/2#issuecomment-...

Much more in the discussion of this particular issue onGitHub: flatbuffers:Reverse engineering #4258

Related but not Rust-specific: FlatBuffers, Cap'n Proto.

If json files are a concern because of space, you can always look into something like protobuffers or flatbuffers. But whatever you use, you should try to find a solution where you don't have to think about the actual serialization/deserialization of your objects, and can just concentrate on the data.

Or, as an alternative to protobuffers, there's also flatbuffers, which is lighter weight and needs less memory: https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/

As the title suggests, I am considering using Flatbuffers as a way to parse sensor data that has been stored in local datafiles. The project language is python.