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.For RPC the binary encoding compares poorly to external schema formats like protobuf. In this context binary ion is a poorly compressed text format.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.