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| Internet media type | application/vnd.msgpack |
|---|---|
| Developed by | Sadayuki Furuhashi |
| Open format? | Yes |
| Website | Official website |
| Original author(s) | Sadayuki Furuhashi |
|---|---|
| Repository | |
| Written in | Various languages |
| Operating system | Any |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Type | Data interchange |
| License | Boost Software License |
| Website | msgpack |
MessagePack is acomputer data interchange format. It is a binary form for representing simpledata structures likearrays andassociative arrays. MessagePack aims to be as compact and simple as possible. The official implementation is available in a variety of languages, some official libraries and others community created, such asC,C++,C#,D,Erlang,Go,Haskell,Java,JavaScript (NodeJS),Lua,OCaml,Perl,PHP,Python,Ruby,Rust,Scala,Smalltalk, andSwift.[1]
Data structures processed by MessagePack loosely correspond to those used inJSON format. They consist of the following element types:
true andfalse)MessagePack is more compact thanJSON, but imposes limitations on array and integer sizes. On the other hand, it allows binary data and non-UTF-8 encoded strings. In JSON, map keys have to be strings, but in MessagePack there is no such limitation and any type can be a map key, including types like maps and arrays, and, likeYAML, numbers.
Compared toBSON, MessagePack is more space-efficient. BSON is designed for fast in-memory manipulation, whereas MessagePack is designed for efficient transmission over the wire. For example, BSON requires null terminators at the end of all strings and inserts string indexes for list elements, while MessagePack doesn't. BSON represents both arrays and maps internally as documents, which are maps, where an array is a map with keys as decimal strings counting up from 0. MessagePack on the other hand represents both maps and arrays as arrays, where each map key-value pair is contiguous, making odd items keys and even items values.
TheProtocol Buffers format provides a significantly more compact transmission format than MessagePack because it doesn't transmit field names. However, while JSON and MessagePack aim to serialize arbitrary data structures with type tags, Protocol Buffers requires a schema to define the data types. Protocol Buffers compiler createsboilerplate code in the target language to facilitate integration of serialization into the application code; MessagePack returns only adynamically typed data structure and provides no automatic structure checks.
MessagePack is referenced inRFC 7049 ofCBOR.