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> shows MsgPack is more space efficient

While I see the same numbers as you do, there's no way a format that includes plaintext keys alongside the values is going to be smaller than a format that only includes a packed field number+type and the corresponding values. There's something fishy going on here, and I can't seem to find a link to the source behind his benchmarks?

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I'm not sure if the benchmarks above reflect this, but MessagePack allows you to use integers (or any data type) for map keys. This makes it a lot smaller than using plaintext keys, and makes it comparable to formats like Protobuf despite the lack of formal schema. (You also lose a lot of the context-free readability of messages, so it's a tradeoff.)

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