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Survey of Binary Serialization Formats

An opinionated tour through the binary serialization formats that move data between processes, machines, and disks.

Read it: https://cloudstreet-dev.github.io/Binary-Serialization-Survey/

Thesis

Binary serialization formats are not interchangeable. Each one is an answer to a question of the form what do you want to optimize for, and what are you willing to give up? The book teaches the reader to read a wire-format specification the way a lawyer reads a contract: looking for the clauses that bind, the omissions that matter, and the words whose definitions are load-bearing.

The axes that organize the survey:

  • schema-required vs. schemaless
  • self-describing vs. external schema
  • row-oriented vs. columnar
  • zero-copy vs. parse
  • code generation vs. runtime reflection
  • deterministic vs. canonical-but-not-deterministic vs. non-deterministic
  • evolution strategy: tagged fields, ordering, hashes, none

Every chapter encodes the same record — Ada Lovelace, six fields — and walks the resulting bytes line by line.

Table of contents

Part I — Foundations

  1. What Serialization Is, and Why "Binary" Is a Category
  2. The Axes
  3. The Person Record

Part II — The Self-Describing Family 4. MessagePack 5. CBOR 6. BSON 7. Smile, UBJSON, Amazon Ion

Part III — Schema-First Wire Formats 8. Protobuf 9. Thrift 10. Avro 11. Schema Evolution Compared

Part IV — Zero-Copy and Random Access 12. FlatBuffers 13. Cap'n Proto 14. SBE 15. rkyv

Part V — Columnar and Analytical 16. Apache Arrow IPC 17. Parquet 18. ORC 19. Feather

Part VI — Domain-Specific and Underappreciated 20. ASN.1 (BER/DER/PER) 21. XDR 22. Borsh and SCALE 23. NBT 24. ROS msgs 25. Bond 26. Postcard and bincode 27. Hessian

Part VII — Choosing 28. Decision Frameworks 29. Anti-Patterns 30. Migration Paths

Part VIII — Rolling Your Own 31. When It's Defensible 32. What You Owe Your Future Self 33. A Worked Example

Appendices

  • A. Hex Tours
  • B. Benchmark Methodology
  • C. Glossary
  • D. Further Reading

Building locally

Install mdBook, then:

mdbook serve --open

The published site is built and deployed by .github/workflows/deploy.yml on every push to main.

License

CC0 1.0 Universal. See LICENSE. The text of the book is released into the public domain, to the extent permitted by law.