SBE VS NBTx

I was about to suggest Chronicle, but it looks like they have gone closed-source. The older version is still interesting to look through though. Aeron / Disruptor / SBE are good projects for inspiration as well.

Could you evaluate how it compares with SBE?

The Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) project now includes support for generating Rust code. Generated code produced does not use unsafe and has no dependencies on any other crates.

SBE

Consider a valid protobuf message with such a field. If you can locate the field value bytes, you can write a new value to the same location without breaking the message. It's obviously possible to the same with the varint type too, as long as you don't change the number of bytes - not so practical, but useful for enum field which has a limited set of useful values (usually less than 128).

Pregenerating protobuf messages you want to send and then modifying the bytes in-place before sending is going to give you a nice performance boost over "normal" protobuf serialization. It can be useful if you need to be protobuf compatible, but it's obviously better to use something like SBE - https://github.com/real-logic/simple-binary-encoding

Because for my upcoming Minecraft clone written in C (yes, yet another Minecraft clone) I needed a binary format just like Notch's NBT, but it's very Java-oriented… Big endian only, and lacks unsigned types. So I decided to make my own format fixing that, based on NBT, and called it NBTx because it sounds cool. It's like .doc when it became .docx. My library is a fork of the cNBT library on GitHub. It's beer-ware licensed so feel free to use it in your own projects! Or better yet, contribute to improve it because currently, it is just a largely-untested adaptation of cNBT (although it is not very complex, most likely it works just fine), and seems like it needs an API to make an nbt tree from scratch. Maybe someone can make C# bindings so it can be used in Unity and reach more devs? (I stopped using Unity some time ago.) The specification is in the NBTx.txt file in the repository. Let me know what you think!