It is a 7 year old article without specifying alternatives to an "already solved problem."

So HN, what are the best alternatives available today and why?

thinkharderdev 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Support across languages etc is much less mature but I find thrift serialization format to be much nicer than protobuf. The codegen somehow manages to produce types that look like types I would actually write compared to the monstrosities that protoc generates.

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gsliepen 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Something like MessagePack or CBOR, and if you want versioning, just have a version field at the start. You don't require a schema to pack/unpack, which I personally think is a good thing.

	▲	fmbb 7 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> You don't require a schema to pack/unpack Then it hardly solves the same problem Protobuf solves.
	▲	mgaunard 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Arrow is also becoming a good contender, with the extra benefit it is better optimized for data batches.

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mdhb 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

CBOR is probably the best and most standards compliant thing out there that I’m aware of.

It’s the new default in a lot of IOT specs, it’s the backbone for deep space communication networks etc..

Maintains interoperability with JSON. Is very much battle tested in very challenging environments.

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rapsey 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are none, protobufs are great.

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nicce 7 days ago | parent [-]

Depends. ASN.1 is a beast and another industry standard, but unfortunately the best tooling is closed source.

	▲	cryptonector 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		There was ZERO PB tooling in 2000. Just write it for ASN.1 instead.

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akavi 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mentioned above: https://github.com/stepchowfun/typical

	▲	7 days ago \| parent [-]
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7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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