Hacker News Reader

Comment by mavam | Hacker News Reader

Here's the link to the spec about extension types: https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack/blob/master/spec.md#exten...

From there:

MessagePack allows applications to define application-specific types using the Extension type. Extension type consists of an integer and a byte array where the integer represents a kind of types and the byte array represents data. Applications can assign 0 to 127 to store application-specific type information. An example usage is that application defines type = 0 as the application's unique type system, and stores name of a type and values of the type at the payload.

View on HN

Ah, thanks! I presume that is done for compactness, because I otherwise see no reason to pack an application type in with the built-in types.

FlexBuffers could support a similar scheme if we wanted to, though putting custom data in the format is already easy enough using the "blob" type, which is arbitrary bytes much like the MessagePack feature.

The nice thing with custom types is that you only need one type dispatching logic.

Sure, it works via stuffing the custom things in blobs, but then you have (1) an extra layer of indirection during dispatch, and (2) always waste a few bits or bytes to store the custom type information, even when you don't need it for actual blobs.

In principle, it's not a lot of effort to reserve a fraction of the type ID space for custom types. From a user's perspective, it's also much nicer to hear that a library cleanly uses existing extensions to the type system, rather than hijacking a general-purpose blob type.

If there's nothing that prevents it, feel free to take this as a feature request :-)

You'd also need a way to patch the custom (de-)serializer into your "dispatch", which currently there isn't.. as unlike MsgPack, FlexBuffers doesn't actually unpack anything.

So this feature would look like a new function IsCustom1() or AsCustom1() etc, where the latter would give you a pointer to the bytes to do your own thing.. so not much difference with Blobs.

Also note that because FlexBuffers is O(1) access to elements, inline data (most scalars) is all the same size, whereas variable sized data is stored over an offset. So again, would not be very different from blobs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com