Request for review - std.serialization (orange)

[Jesse Phillips]

On Monday, 1 April 2013 at 08:53:51 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-04-01 01:39, Jesse Phillips wrote:
>
>> I'm not well versed in PB or Orange so I'd need to play around 
>> more with
>> both, but I'm pretty sure Orange would need changes made to be 
>> able to
>> make the claim PB is supported. It should be possible to 
>> create a binary
>> format based on PB.
>
> Isn't PB binary? Or it actually seems it can be both.

Let me see if I can describe this.

PB does encoding to binary by type. However it also has a schema 
in a .proto file. My first concern is that this file provides the 
ID to use for each field, while arbitrary the ID must be what is 
specified.

The second one I'm concerned with is option to pack repeated 
fields. I'm not sure the specifics for this encoding, but I 
imagine some compression.

This is why I think I'd have to implement my own Serializer to be 
able to support PB, but also believe we could have a binary 
format based on PB (which maybe it would be possible to create a 
schema of Orange generated data, but it would be hard to generate 
data for a specific schema).