flatbuffers
Advanced tools
FlatBuffers
FlatBuffers is a cross platform serialization library architected for maximum memory efficiency. It allows you to directly access serialized data without parsing/unpacking it first, while still having great forwards/backwards compatibility.
Build the compiler for flatbuffers (flatc)
Use cmake to create the build files for your platform and then perform the compilation (Linux example).
cmake -G "Unix Makefiles"
make -j
Define your flatbuffer schema (.fbs)
Write the schema to define the data you want to serialize. See monster.fbs for an example.
Generate code for your language(s)
Use the flatc compiler to take your schema and generate language-specific code:
./flatc --cpp --rust monster.fbs
Which generates monster_generated.h and monster_generated.rs files.
Serialize data
Use the generated code, as well as the FlatBufferBuilder to construct your serialized buffer. (C++ example)
Transmit/store/save Buffer
Use your serialized buffer however you want. Send it to someone, save it for later, etc...
Read the data
Use the generated accessors to read the data from the serialized buffer.
It doesn't need to be the same language/schema version, FlatBuffers ensures the data is readable across languages and schema versions. See the Rust example reading the data written by C++.
Go to our landing page to browse our documentation.
Code generation and runtime libraries for many popular languages.
FlatBuffers does not follow traditional SemVer versioning (see rationale) but rather uses a format of the date of the release.
flatbuffers tag for any questions regarding FlatBuffers.To contribute to this project, see CONTRIBUTING.
Please see our Security Policy for reporting vulnerabilities.
Flatbuffers is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text.
Protobuf.js is a pure JavaScript implementation of Protocol Buffers, a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. Compared to FlatBuffers, Protobuf.js requires a parsing step to access data, which can be less efficient in performance-critical applications.
MessagePack is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON but it's faster and smaller. Compared to FlatBuffers, MessagePack is simpler but may not offer the same level of performance for complex data structures.
Avro is a data serialization system that provides rich data structures and a compact, fast, binary data format. The 'avsc' package is a pure JavaScript implementation of Avro. Compared to FlatBuffers, Avro is more focused on schema evolution and data interchange, while FlatBuffers is optimized for performance.
FAQs
Memory Efficient Serialization Library
The npm package flatbuffers receives a total of 10,300,165 weekly downloads. As such, flatbuffers popularity was classified as popular.
We found that flatbuffers demonstrated a not healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released a year ago. It has 2 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
Research
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