Json.NET VS MessagePack for C# (.NET, .NET Core, Unity, Xamarin)

Dealing with JSON in .NET? Newtonsoft.Json (aka Json.NET) has got you covered.

In my opinion, the single biggest issue with Newtonsoft.Json is https://github.com/JamesNK/Newtonsoft.Json/issues/862.

Sure, you can disable it, but the fact that it is opt-out to begin with - i.e. that by default the parser will try to creatively interpret any string it sees in JSON input and convert in a locale-specific manner that also quietly loses data - is, frankly, insane through and through. I've personally run into this issue many times in existing code - it usually happens when people first start using the library and just never run into any inputs that would trigger this behavior while testing. Then once that code is shipped, someone somewhere just happens to have the data that triggers it.

And if you look at the comments to that issue, there are numerous mentions from other GitHub repos due to bugs it caused for them, including some Microsoft projects.

The cherry on that cake was author's response indicating that he doesn't even understand why this design is problematic in the first place: "I like what it does, I have no plans to change it, and I would do it again if given the chance." I wouldn't trust any parser written with this kind of attitude.

9. Newtonsoft.Json

Estamos usando o conversor do Newtonsoft

This bug and many others related to time: https://github.com/JamesNK/Newtonsoft.Json/issues/862 And they will never get fixes, because the project is kind of dead. Edit: and actually, the creator claim to have made it like this on purpose, so I don't trust it anymore.

There's a related discussion on the GitHub repo:

Nuget is where you'll get 3rd party libraries (such as Newtonsoft.Json for JSON processing)

There's a very good MessagePack serialization library for C#. I've used it in many of the games I worked on.

https://github.com/MessagePack-CSharp/MessagePack-CSharp

Given it's a binary serialization framework, it should not be too difficult, because the domain is well-explored and numerous libraries exist in C# which address same goals that Fury does.

More popular/newer examples are https://github.com/Cysharp/MemoryPack (which is similar to Fury with its own spec, C#-code first schema), https://github.com/MessagePack-CSharp/MessagePack-CSharp or even gRPC / Protobuf tooling https://github.com/grpc/grpc-dotnet

With Unity/IL2CPP stuff: For general-purpose serialization libraries like JSON, you sometimes need to provide hints to make sure types are included: https://github.com/jilleJr/Newtonsoft.Json-for-Unity/wiki/Fi...

For schema serialization on known types, there are codegen tools (i.e. moc for MessagePack): https://github.com/neuecc/MessagePack-CSharp

MessagePack is migrating to Rosalyn code generators, so basically invisible codegen. Cysharp's newer serialization library, MessagePack, already uses this: https://github.com/Cysharp/MemoryPack

Thanks, I'm sure I'll need it, though I do have my own platform with serialization set up already that I'm hoping I can port relatively easily (It's backended with MessagePack C# which is a lovely serializer for Unity.)

In the Road map of features #119 for MessagePack-CSharp, they checked the box for:

Try MessagePack for serialization. It will help to reduce the size of the message and the time of serialization.

I mentioned JSON, but there are many formats that are much more efficient. I can mention FlatBuffers, MessagePack and ProtoBuf. These are the ones I've used myself, and personally I'm most comfortable with MessagePack and ProtoBuf. I don't think the performance would be an issue if you had to choose between these three, it's mostly the API that is different.