Re:Jailbreaking RabbitOS: Uncovering secret logs, and GPL vi...
by ForHackernews on Thursday July 18, 2024 @05:26PM
(#40999920)
Oh, as I understand it Avro's schemas aren't just "built in" as in supported as a first-class part of the protocol, but rather that each message includes with it the schema needed to interpret it. This adds overhead to every message (it's still a binary protocol, though) but crucially it avoids a whole category of hassles around schema distribution and updating.
I'm not sure what Avro is doing, but as a rule schema enables you to have less overhead, rather than more. The main advantage of MessagePack over schema-based formats is that it's dead-simple and mostly compatible with JSON. Schema-based formats usually need either a code generator or maintaining an annotated version of your data classes and making sure they match the schema.
(Of course, with JSON or MessagePack you might still end up using a serialization library and something like JSON Schema).