[erlang-questions] fyi: Google protocol buffers

[David Terrell]

On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 11:40:33AM -0400, john s wolter wrote:
> Torben & Christian,
> 
> The Google protocol is similar to ASN.1, see the Wikipedia ASN.1 links below
> which include an XML mapping link.  I'm wondering as Google's documentation
> mentions, why the XML  version is so much slower in the Internet's already
> slow context.  The .proto approach can't be that much faster considering the
> time consumption of other processes in the chain of events.  It could be a
> Google specific issue.  Note however,  this message handling kind of backend
> application is perfect for Erlang.

Remember, this is an internal communication protocol, not external.
There's a lot of emphasis on pre-shared bits (the .proto files) and
latency and being able to handle 100mbit+ of traffic efficiently
matters (it does not matter to a single machine on the internet, 
generally speaking).

-- 
David Terrell
dbt@REDACTED
((meatspace)) http://meat.net/