And why don’t you just send it in binary? REST doesn’t mean you have to use JSON for the HTTP body.
Yeah, that would be ideal.
Some of the protocols we talk over(APRS) are ASCII only(which is a bit of point B from above).
Transmissions are also signed at the radio so that they can be authenticated down the line which means that you can't easily change the payload envelope once it leaves the radio.
Our main goal is adoption and talking base64 means that lots of APIs that would take an intermediate server to do the translation aren't needed. This lowers to barrier to use and means we have a larger surface area of use cases.
Re:Fast base64 encoding and decoding
by sd8dgf8ds8g8dsg on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @10:30PM
(#16174453)
It sounds like her use case is badly suited for raw binary transmission due to the high possibility of data loss, much like the internet used to be when base64 was originally introduced.
I've been working on a project lately with 1200bps radio links that are making REST calls on the other end and 2 vs 3 bytes makes a massive difference.