It's like JSON.
but fast and small.
MessagePack is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it's faster and smaller. Small integers are encoded into a single byte, and typical short strings require only one extra byte in addition to the strings themselves.
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MessagePack is supported by over 50 programming languages and environments.
See list of implementations.
Redis scripting has support for MessagePack because it is a fast and compact serialization format with a simple to implement specification. I liked it so much that I implemented a MessagePack C extension for Lua just to include it into Redis.
Fluentd uses MessagePack for all internal data representation. It's crazy fast because of zero-copy optimization of msgpack-ruby. Now MessagePack is an essential component of Fluentd to achieve high performance and flexibility at the same time.
Treasure Data built a multi-tenant database optimized for analytical queries using MessagePack. The schemaless database is growing by billions of records every month. We also use MessagePack as a glue between components. Actually we just wanted a fast replacement of JSON, and MessagePack is simply useful.
MessagePack has been simply invaluable to us. We use MessagePack + Memcache to cache many of our feeds on Pinterest. These feeds are compressed and very quick to unpack thanks to MessagePack while Memcache gives us fast atomic pushes.
Also use MessagePack? Waiting for your testimonial!