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A comment on Show HN: ION, a JSON alternative – Versatile, compact, fast, binary data format. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: ION, a JSON alternative – Versatile, compact, fa... by umanwizard on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @01:54PM (#11028673)
It's nice to not have to assume the client and server are running the exact same version of the protocol. If you use ordinal numbers instead of names, you can never remove or reorder things without completely breaking backward compatibility. You can only append new fields to the end.
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Re:Show HN: ION, a JSON alternative – Versatile, compact, fa... by ambrice on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @03:39PM (#11029582)
The tag numbers are part of the message definitions, they're not assigned arbitrarily. So absolutely you can reorder them. And as long as you described them as "optional" in the original message definition you can remove them without breaking backwards compatibility.
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