panama-foreign VS FlatBuffers

Going to copy my Reddit comment over to HN because I think it's valuable:

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One of the coolest things that's been worked on (by this same author, no less!) isn't even in the article!

Per has written a pretty-printer for MemorySegments and ByteBuffers that can hex-dump memory or render memory/buffers as their "struct" representations given some MemoryLayout.

You can also customize it with your own printers, it's wicked cool and helps so much to debug buffers when working with them.

https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/pull/695

What do I mean by that? Have a look at this comment for an image of a raw memory structure layout I represented with MemoryLayout, and the pretty-print rendering of it:

https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/pull/695#issuecomm...

[Here's the project github](https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign)

I am not using any special flag (is there one?) but the overhead seems quite high, especially considering the explanation on how these methods are compiled https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/blob/foreign-jextract/doc/panama_ffi.md

https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/blob/foreign-jextract/doc/panama_jextract.md ..look at these examples

I found the full context for the change written up here https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/pull/554

Incentive for JVM devs? We know that C interoperability, malloc, free, structs are already supported on JVM natively since Java 14 with project panama's foreign-memory-api without JNI. I've been using sun.misc.Unsafe since Java8 and also LWJGL's C API.

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Cap'n Proto was originally made for https://sandstorm.io/.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