FlatBuffers VS Kryo

According to the official website:

> Protobuf is intentionally designed to NOT require any parsing at all.

As others have mentioned, this is simply not the case, and the VARINT encoding is a trivial counterexample.

It is this required decoding/parsing that (largely) distinguishes protobuf from Google's flatbuffers:

https://github.com/google/flatbuffers

https://flatbuffers.dev/

Cap'n Proto (developed by Kenton Varda, the former Google engineer who, while at Google, re-wrote/refactored Google's protobuf to later open source it as the library we all know today) is another example of zero-copy (de)serialization.

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Cap'n Proto was originally made for https://sandstorm.io/.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

Other serialization alternatives have a schema validation option: e.g., Avro, Kryo and Protocol Buffers. Interestingly enough, gRPC uses Protobuf to offer RPC across distributed components:

Use Kryo Serialization with setRegistrationRequired(false): https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/kryo

If you need something quick and dirty to replace the default java serialization with zero configuration needed, use Kryo