IAP Tools for D

[Jakob Jenkov via Digitalmars-d-announce]

> I suggest to compare also against this [1].
> The author, Kenton Varda, was the primary author of Protocol 
> Buffers version 2, which is the version that Google released 
> open source.
>
> [1] https://capnproto.org


I just had a look at Cap'n Proto. From what I can see in the 
encoding spec, performance of ION will be comparable.

Cap'n Proto claims to be "infinitely faster" than Google Protocol 
Buffers, but that is only if you do not pack the CP data - in 
which case it will transfer slower over the network. CP solves 
that using packing - but then you are back to serialization / 
deserialization, and the original promise of being "inifinitely 
faster" is gone.

Cap'n Proto also has the "problem" that its messages require an 
external schema. To iterate through a Cap'n Proto file / message 
you must already know what data is in it (the schema).

Some see this as an advantage, because it forces you to write a 
schema for your data structure, and you get slightly faster 
encoding / decoding time.

And others see this is a disadvantage because you now have to 
import schemas, or generate code, in order to read a serialized 
message. You cannot just step through it like you can with e.g. 
XML or JSON. I tend to be in this camp - although I am not blind 
to the arguments in favor of external schemas. Speed matters, but 
so does ease-of-use.

On a network protocol level I tend to disagree with the 
"distributed object" model. I know Capn Proto tries to explain 
why this model is not a problem with CP. However, fine grained 
communication between fine grained distributed objects *is* a 
performance killer in the long run, regardless of whether you 
"pipeline" requests.

ION is intended to be the message format for our IAP network 
protocol. IAP will be message oriented, so you can do one-way 
messaging, request-response, subscriptions (e.g. to a stream), 
pipelining, routing of messages via intermediate nodes etc.

Anyways, if you really want to use Cap'N Proto (or something 
else) over IAP (+ION) you can just nest a binary message inside 
an IAP message, and then parse it any way you like when it comes 
out.