FlatBuffers VS Bitsery

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Cap'n Proto was originally made for https://sandstorm.io/.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.

Thanks for sharing https://github.com/fraillt/bitsery it seems more powerful but require quite a boilerplate code for even very simple composite stuff. With ByteStream you can totally forget about deep you are in the data-structure hierarchy.

Bitsery is the closest I've seen to it, but you have to use extensions (which i can't yet figure out the API for) to make it achieve byte for byte compatbility

If size and performance matter, then take a look at bitsery. * it might be 9x+ faster than cereal and 18x faster than protobuf. * size-wise, you might save 20-30% by default * on top of that you additional might opt-in into: * bit-level serialization control (e.g. if your values are in the range 1000-2000 it will take you 10bits, or use VLE) * backward-forward compatibility support * pointer support, including raw pointers with the ability to provide custom allocator. * and powerful extensions system, which allows you to further customize things in any way you want it :)

About on par with nlohmann is a binary serialization lib called Bitsery. It's easy to use, and will be a lot more performant than json. The downside is that the serialized data won't be human readable.