MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small
> MessagePack: It's like JSON. but fast and smalland complete.Both are minimal self describing data serialization formats, but JSON is incomplete. It misses a type to represent one of the fundamental type: byte blobs. And also parts of floats.Which means there are a lot inconsistent ways to hack that in e.g. base64 encoded strings. But this means it's loosing partially it's property of being self-describing (same if you allow numbers as strings e.g. "-12").Just to be clear I'm not saying JSON should have bytes directly in it. But a "native" base64 string additional to string, number, null, list and map would help. E.g. `{ "bytes": b"YWJjZGU=" }`Wrt. floats it's missing (+/-) Infinity, NaN is more like a error variant so it's okish to be missing, but then why not have it.Also for completeness it would be better to differentiate between int and float as float is imprecise due to rounding errors.----PS: I don't like `null` but having it in this kind of data serialization format is still required. But the difference between a field not being there and it being `null` can be a mess and not all tools handle it well.PPS: Both JSON and MsgPack can be used for non self describing serialization, e.g. by serializing the a record (fixed number of fields in known order) as a list of values instead of a mapping. But both are focused on enabling self describing serialization.EDIT: PPPS: Yes, it's a very weak form of self-describing is use here, there are systems which are much more self describing e.g. XML+XML Schema linked from the XML document but also tend to be far more complex