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0 pointskragen7y ago0 comments

After spending most of a year doing deep surgery on systems that used CBOR extensively, I can report that the common CBOR parsers are not faster than common JSON parsers; surprisingly, they are actually slower. CBOR is also not easier; it's much less widely supported, and you need a separate debugging representation. It does have three real advantages over JSON: it supports binary strings, it's a monument to Carsten Bormann's ego, and data encoded in CBOR takes slightly fewer bytes than the same data encoded in JSON. (The second is only an advantage if you're Carsten Bormann.)

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spc4767y ago

There are a few more advantages to CBOR:

1) there's a distinction between integers and floating point values;

2) you can semantically tag values (yes, this is a text string, but treat it as a date; this is a binary string, but treat it as a big number; etc.);

3) you can have maps with non-text keys.

I'm not sure what Carsten Bormann's ego has to do with CBOR, but I found RFC-7049 one of the better written specs, with plenty of encoding examples. It made it real easy to write a encoder/decoder [1] and use the examples as test cases.

[1] https://github.com/spc476/CBOR

kragenOP7y ago

All three of those could be advantages under some circumstances, but I've more often found them to be disadvantages. What do you do with maps with non-text keys when you're deserializing in JS or Perl? For that matter, what do you do in Python when the key of a map is a map? When you have a date, do you decode it as a datetime object, as a text string, or as some kind of wrapper object that gives you both alternatives?

I agree that having lots of examples in the spec is good.

spc4767y ago

> What do you do with maps with non-text keys when you're deserializing in JS or Perl?

Um, use another language? I use Lua, which can deal with non-text keys. As for decoding dates (if they're semantically tagged, which you can with CBOR) I convert it to a datetime object, on the grounds that if I care about tagged dates, I'm going to be using them in some capacity.

But that's not to say you have to use the flexibility of CBOR. But for me, having distinct integer and floating point values, plus distinct text and binary data, is enough of a win to use it over JSON.

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0 pointskragen7y ago0 comments

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spc4767y ago

There are a few more advantages to CBOR:

1) there's a distinction between integers and floating point values;

2) you can semantically tag values (yes, this is a text string, but treat it as a date; this is a binary string, but treat it as a big number; etc.);

3) you can have maps with non-text keys.

[1] https://github.com/spc476/CBOR

kragenOP7y ago

I agree that having lots of examples in the spec is good.

spc4767y ago

> What do you do with maps with non-text keys when you're deserializing in JS or Perl?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse