Binary Protocols - The Current State of Affairs
summary
Compares Protobuf, FlatBuffers and CapnProto and gives concrete tradeoffs: Protobuf requires full-message read and uses varint length-delimited fields, so it keeps wire footprint small and suits frequent small RPCs; FlatBuffers and CapnProto use zero-copy root/table layouts for direct memory mapping, so traversal into large nested data is much faster; CapnProto binds data into 64-bit words and builds root-down while FlatBuffers builds bottom-up via vtables, which increases padding and message size but reduces decode CPU. Tooling is mature; choose by payload shape not benchmarks.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (27)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:28Morse Code
- 3:58History
- 4:10Problems with RPC
- 5:04HTTP
- 5:25XML
- 5:57JSON
- 6:26Web Services
- 7:02Make it Fast
- 7:45Protocol Buffers
- 9:40String
- 9:58Variable Integer
- 13:09Captain Proto
- 14:07Words of Data
- 14:42CaptainProto
- 15:27FlatBuffers
- 16:56More Options
- 17:16Benchmarks
- 17:48Tooling
- 18:21Why Binary Protocols
- 19:11Microservices
- 20:29Shrinking Footprint
- 20:46Economy Stupid
- 21:29Container Solutions
- 21:44Cloud Native
- 22:14Streaming
- 24:32proto
