On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Dario Teixeira
<darioteixeira@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Sexplib scores very good on ease of use, future-proofness, and
> portability, and reasonably good on performance and human-readability.
> My guess is that bin-prot has better performance but worse portability
> and future-proofness, and nill human-readability.  Marshal gets
> top scores in performance and ease of use, but fails miserably in
> future-proofness, human-readability, and portability.

Bin-prot is settled in its design.  We heavily rely on it here at Jane
Street and store TBs of data in it so there is no way it's going to
change.  I would say it is future-proof.

Portability could be improved, of course, e.g. to bigendian
architectures, etc., but that's not hard to do.  Performance is
definitely competitive to marshal: writing is noticably faster, and
reading only marginally slower.  It also requires a little less
storage space.  Main problem here is actually that it doesn't support
shared / cyclic datastructures.  I don't think anybody would blame it
for not being human-readable, because that's the nature of binary
protocols ;-)

Regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl@gmail.com