Performant Entity Serialization: BSON vs MessagePack (vs JSON)

Question

Recently I\'ve found MessagePack, an alternative binary serialization format to Google\'s Protocol Buffers and JSON which also out

Answer 1

A key difference not yet mentioned is that BSON contains size information in bytes for the entire document and further nested sub-documents.

document    ::=     int32 e_list

This has two major benefits for restricted environments (e.g. embedded) where size and performance is important.

1. You can immediately check if the data you're going to parse represents a complete document or if you're going to need to request more at some point (be it from some connection or storage). Since this is most likely an asynchronous operation you might already send a new request before parsing.
2. Your data might contain entire sub-documents with irrelevant information for you. BSON allows you to easily traverse to the next object past the sub-document by using the size information of the sub-document to skip it. msgpack on the other hands contains the number of elements inside whats called a map (similar to BSON's sub-documents). While this is undoubtedly useful information it doesn't help the parser. You'd still have to parse every single object inside the map and can't just skip it. Depending on the structure of your data this might have a huge impact on performance.