On Wednesday 21 Sep 2016 14:00:23 Andreas Schildbach via bitcoin-dev wrote: > Just glancing over your BIP, I wonder if we should use Protobuf. It uses > this "flexible" format already and is quite compact/binary. We use > Protobuf already for the payment protocol, and there is very good tool > support.
There is a lot of overlap between different binary formats. Looking through the on-the-wire protocol you'll see that my spec is very similar. Practically all the advantages of protobuf are present in CMF. I can write you a java parser if you want, it should be easy to port from Qt/C++ code :) https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/transactions CMF: https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/documentation/blob/master/spec/compactmessageformat.md There is no tool support needed, just one or two classes. Which personally I think is an advantage. Some advantages of CMF over protobuf from the top of my head; * It reuses the var-int parsing that Bitcoin uses (which is itself slightly different from others). * zero-copy support (not relevant for this bip, though). * Additional values addition (i.e. adding new data) is .. tricky in protobuf. https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto#updating * In my experience parsing a message manually (like a SOX parser) is much better in reporting errors and detecting wrong usages than auto-generated code (but personally I'm not much a fan of auto-generated APIs) at all... * Generated parsing/writing code will not be as fast as we can make it. * CMF is more compact (uses less bytes) for its messages. Protobuf is something I've used before and I think we can do better. I think that CMF together with some support classes can do this better. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
