Amazon Ion – A richly-typed, self-describing, hierarchical serialization format
I don't like ion. The added features (over json) don't pull their weight. Symbols, annotations and the binary format all add significant complexity but don't make the format much better. As a consequence of the added complexity language support is poor.<p>For RPC the binary encoding compares poorly to external schema formats like protobuf. In this context binary ion is a poorly compressed text format.<p>I don't think the partial document read capability of the binary format is all that important, but I've never worked on an application that would benefit from it either.