MessagePack VS Cap'n Proto

Compare MessagePack vs Cap'n Proto and see what are their differences.

MessagePack

MessagePack serializer implementation for Java / msgpack.org[Java] (by msgpack)

Cap'n Proto

Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library (by capnproto)
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MessagePack Cap'n Proto
22 66
1,377 11,163
0.4% 1.5%
8.1 9.3
6 days ago 7 days ago
Java C++
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

MessagePack

Posts with mentions or reviews of MessagePack. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-02.

Cap'n Proto

Posts with mentions or reviews of Cap'n Proto. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-09.
  • Mysterious Moving Pointers
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2024
    Yeah I pretty much only use my own alternate container implementations (from KJ[0]), which avoid these footguns, but the result is everyone complains our project is written in Kenton-Language rather than C++ and there's no Stack Overflow for it and we can't hire engineers who know how to write it... oops.

    [0] https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/v2/kjdoc/tour.md

  • Show HN: Comprehensive inter-process communication (IPC) toolkit in modern C++
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2024
    - may massively reduce the latency involved.

    Those sharing Cap'n Proto-encoded data may have particular interest. Cap'n Proto (https://capnproto.org) is fantastic at its core task - in-place serialization with zero-copy - and we wanted to make the IPC (inter-process communication) involving capnp-serialized messages be zero-copy, end-to-end.

    That said, we paid equal attention to other varieties of payload; it's not limited to capnp-encoded messages. For example there is painless (<-- I hope!) zero-copy transmission of arbitrary combinations of STL-compliant native C++ data structures.

    To help determine whether Flow-IPC is relevant to you we wrote an intro blog post. It works through an example, summarizes the available features, and has some performance results. https://www.linode.com/blog/open-source/flow-ipc-introductio...

    Of course there's nothing wrong with going straight to the GitHub link and getting into the README and docs.

    Currently Flow-IPC is for Linux. (macOS/ARM64 and Windows support could follow soon, depending on demand/contributions.)

  • Condvars and atomics do not mix
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Mar 2024
    FWIW, my C++ toolkit library, KJ, does the same thing.[0]

    But presumably you could still write a condition predicate which looks at things which aren't actually part of the mutex-wrapped structure? Or does is the Rust type system able to enforce that the callback can only consider the mutex-wrapped value and values that are constant over the lifetime of the wait? (You need the latter e.g. if you are waiting for the mutex-wrapped value to compare equal to some local variable...)

    [0] https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/e6ad6f919aeb381b...

  • Cap'n'Proto: infinitely faster than Protobuf
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Feb 2024
  • I don’t understand zero copy
    2 projects | /r/rust | 7 Dec 2023
    The second one is to encode data in such a way that you can read it and operate on it directly from the buffer. You write data in a layout that is the same, or easily transformed as types in memory. To do that you usually need to encode with a known schema, only Sized types to efficiently compute fields locations as offsets in the buffer, and you usually represent pointers as offset into the encode. You can look at capnproto protocol for instance https://capnproto.org/
  • OpenTF Renames Itself to OpenTofu
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2023
    Worked well for Cap'n Proto (the cerealization protocol)! https://capnproto.org/
  • A Critique of the Cap'n Proto Schema Language
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Aug 2023
    With all due respect, you read completely wrong.

    * The very first use case for which Cap'n Proto was designed was to be the protocol that Sandstorm.io used to talk between sandbox and supervisor -- an explicitly adversarial security scenario.

    * The documentation explicitly calls out how implementations should manage resource exhaustion problems like deep recursion depth (stack overflow risk).

    * The implementation has been fuzz-tested multiple ways, including as part of Google's oss-fuzz.

    * When there are security bugs, I issue advisories like this:

    https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/tree/v2/security-advi...

    * The primary aim of the entire project is to be a Capability-Based Security RPC protocol.

  • Cap'n Proto: serialization/RPC system – core tools and C++ library
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jul 2023
  • Sandstorm: Open-source platform for self-hosting web app
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Jun 2023
    I like how they use capability-based security [0] and use Cap'n Proto protocol. This is another technology that is slow to get broad adoption, but has many things going for when compared to e.g. Protocol Buffers (Cap'n Proto is created by the primary author of Protobuf v2, Kenton Varda).

    [0] https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works#capabilities

    [1] https://capnproto.org

  • Flatty - flat message buffers with direct mapping to Rust types without packing/unpacking
    4 projects | /r/rust | 10 May 2023
    Related but not Rust-specific: FlatBuffers, Cap'n Proto.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing MessagePack and Cap'n Proto you can also consider the following projects:

FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library

gRPC - The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)

Kryo - Java binary serialization and cloning: fast, efficient, automatic

Protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format

protostuff - Java serialization library, proto compiler, code generator

ZeroMQ - ZeroMQ core engine in C++, implements ZMTP/3.1

ZLib - A massively spiffy yet delicately unobtrusive compression library.

Apache Thrift - Apache Thrift

FST - FST: fast java serialization drop in-replacement

nanomsg - nanomsg library