On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 11:37 AM, Doug Cutting <[email protected]> wrote:
> Protobuf binary only has sizes, not types. > I've always thought of the encoding as having types, but overloading ints and floats and lettting the decoder figure it out. (possibly because at one point I think it was actually types, but then new features were overloaded on existing bits) But yes, thinking of it as having sizes seems more correct. The most important part for me is that the fields are delimited. Thrift's efficient encodings probably also just have sizes. > Do you have a reference to this? The stuff I've been told (mostly from ex-googlers turned facebookers) is that it has a byte for types. The only documentation I'm able to find is this new compact format design<http://wiki.apache.org/thrift/New_compact_binary_protocol>which still has types but encodes them more compactly. (of course there is always the code, but I havn't ready that). I suppose Thrift is a bit of a wildcard in attempting to support multiple binary formats.
