FlatBuffers

FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library (by google)

FlatBuffers Alternatives

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a better FlatBuffers alternative or higher similarity.

FlatBuffers discussion

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FlatBuffers reviews and mentions

Posts with mentions or reviews of FlatBuffers. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-03-06.
  • JSON vs Protocol Buffers vs FlatBuffers: A Deep Dive
    3 projects | dev.to | 6 Mar 2025
    FlatBuffers, also developed by Google, is a highly optimized serialization library designed for scenarios where zero-copy deserialization is required.
  • Google discontinuing work on Dart macros
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2025
    Oh how I enjoy trying to compile and use projects where they use some complex home brew codegen system often written in a different language entirely [1]. Luckily they often use Python as part of some core build step which never breaks compatability in their regex librwry [2].

    Yes macros can be a pain and should be limited, but in my experience, a couple hundred lines of macros replaces many thousands of lines code generators with complicated baroque build system integrations (ahem ROS2). The tradeoff is even worse when the language supports templates and compile time operations which can usually replace macros with even less code and are easier to understand. Though at least Go supports codegen properly with support in its official tooling.

    1: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/src/idl_ge...

  • Go Protobuf: The New Opaque API
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2024
  • JSON vs FlatBuffers vs Protocol Buffers
    3 projects | dev.to | 7 Aug 2024
    According to the official website:
  • gRPC: The Bad Parts
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jun 2024
    > 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.

  • FlatBuffers – an efficient cross platform serialization library for many langs
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Sep 2023
  • Cap'n Proto 1.0
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jul 2023
    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-...

  • Anyone has experience with reverse engineering flatbuffers?
    1 project | /r/REGames | 25 May 2023
    Much more in the discussion of this particular issue onGitHub: flatbuffers:Reverse engineering #4258
  • 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.
  • flatbuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library
    1 project | /r/programming_art | 7 Mar 2023
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    www.saashub.com | 14 May 2025
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