[erlang-questions] BERT vs protobuf in the erlang world

[Vincent de Phily]

On Wednesday 24 August 2011 08:37:43 Steve Davis wrote:
> WRT to the OP, and in my simple-minded world, protobuffs always seemed
> like a lot of hassle for not much gain;

Grammar-described formats have a few advantages over self-described formats, 
such as validation, size, and speed. But self-describing formats can be great 
too. Depends on your use-case.

> And if there is concern about
> the verbosity or sending big binaries why not use gzip? Maybe there's
> room for an extension to BERT/BERT-RPC to define the use of gzip
> compression?

I no fan of RPC frameworks, they tend to be either sinfully complicated or so 
simple that you might as well roll your own.

Of course you should compress your data. But I dont think it should 
standardized in the wirelevel format. Maybe you want a compression algorythm 
that has a different speed/size tradeoff. Maybe you packets are so small or so 
tightly encoded (hello UPER !) that gziping them makes them bigger, not 
smaller.
-- 
Vincent de Phily