So in that sense they aren’t all that modern as they’ve failed to evolve and keep up with platform evolutions.
Bebop just aims to generate code that modern and current with its target language, works everywhere, and avoids pitfalls protobuf suffers from.
I can't speak for Google's official implementation though.
Even though our schema was huge, it still did serialisation in a time that was surprisingly small for our underpowered chip.
And I can tell the C# code it generates is going to be plagued by vtable lookups. Some decent ideas though.
And overall observation is the less code and the simpler it is, the better, notably gRPC suffers from its pipeline/interceptors-support style implementations and insisting on usings its own types replacing T[] and List<T>, putting irreducible mandatory cost in places where it may matter most (unless you partially bypass those with reflection/unsafe accessor like I had to do once))
It's nice to finally see some quality alternatives to Protobuf.
One idea I like from Slice are custom types. Is there anything similar in Bebop?
They aren’t relevant to what Bebop is doing and thus no benchmark or comparison can be made between them.
The main limitation of Cap'n Proto compared to Protobuf is the ecosystem -- missing or poor-quality implementations in many languages, limited tooling, etc. Admittedly this is probably a showstopper for most users. It's also the hardest thing for any new contender to solve.
With all that said I would tend to agree that benchmarks are probably pointless. I've spent a lot of time benchmarking serialization and one thing I know is that benchmark results will vary wildly depending on the use case. A benchmark of an example/toy use case isn't really indicative of performance in a real use case.
(I'm the author of Cap'n Proto. I don't know much about Flatbuffers so can't comment there.)
Flatbuffers immediately compares itself to protobufs as well on the front page.
I’m also working on a textual configuration language that allowa you to import a schema and define data like JSON.
Sorry, but I would like some benchmark data to these claims....
And all the time I use JSON, there don't exists multiple versions and any JSON file that is somewhere can get read by almost every language. (And I can read the file even with every editor)
The docs go into more detail on how different types are handled. We also have some special features like “binary schema” which let you ship your schema with data so clients are always up to date.
I’m not really in the market for another proprietary binary data format that doesn’t integrate with anything outside its immediate ecosystem.
Update: Coming soon!
