[erlang-questions] Announce: the Piqi project

[Evgeniy Khramtsov]

13.09.2010 18:07, Anton Lavrik wrote:
> It is my pleasure to announce the Piqi project to the Erlang community. I've
> just released a new version which features Erlang support.
>
>
> Piqi is a cross-language data serialization system compatible with Google
> Protocol Buffers with native support for Erlang and OCaml.
>
> OCaml and Erlang programmers can use Piqi to conveniently serialize and
> deserialize data using a portable binary format which can be understood by
> programs written in Python, Java, C++ and other languages supported by Google
> Protocol Buffers. In this sense, Piqi provides Protocol Buffers support for
> OCaml and Erlang.
>
> Compared to Protocol Buffers, Piqi relies on a richer data definition language
> which has a more natural mapping to functional languages. For instance, in
> addition to records and enums, Piqi supports variants (tagged unions), variant
> subtyping, lists and type aliases.
>
> Some other Piqi features include:
> - Support for data schema evolution (Protocol Buffers style).
> - "import" and "include" for reusing type definitions from other modules.
> - Powerful extensions mechanism for records and variants.
> - Structured default values for optional fields.
>
> Compatibility between Piqi and Protocol Buffers is maintained as follows:
> - Piqi specifications can be automatically converted to equivalent Protobuf
>    specifications and vice versa (with very few exceptions).
> - Piqi and Protocol Buffers use the same binary encoding as a serialization
>    format.
>
> Piqi comes with several additional tools:
> - Piq -- a high-level data representation language. It has full support for Piqi
>    data types and it is easier to read, write and edit compared to XML or JSON.
> - Piqi tools for validating, pretty-printing and converting data between Piq,
>    JSON and portable binary encoding.
>
>
> Erlang support highlights
> =========================
>
> - Generated Erlang type and record definitions as well as
>    serialization/deserialization code are EEP8-compliant and provide all necessary
>    type information for Dialyzer.
>
> - Support for recursive record types.
>
> - Support for Unicode strings which can be passed as string() (i.e. list of
>    Unicode codepoints) or utf-8 binary().
>
> - Support for custom Erlang identifiers. For example, if some identifier from
>    existing Proto or Piqi specification conflicts with an Erlang keyword, it is
>    possible to define a custom Erlang-specific identifier without changing the
>    original one and breaking backward compatibility.
>
> - Capitalized and "CamelCase" Piqi/Protobuf identifiers are automatically
>    converted to uncapitalized and "camel_case" Erlang ids.
>
> - Configurable prefixes for type and record identifiers (since Erlang doesn't
>    have any kind of namespace support for types and records, we need to prefix
>    them to avoid conflicts with names defined in other modules).
>
> - Tested with Erlang/OTP R13B04 and R14A.
>
>
> Further references
> ==================
>
> Homepage:
>
>          http://piqi.org
>
> GitHub repository and several Erlang examples:
>
>          http://github.com/alavrik/piqi
>          http://github.com/alavrik/piqi/tree/master/examples/addressbook/
>
> Details of Piqi to Erlang mapping:
>
>          http://piqi.org/doc/mappings/erlang/
>
>
> Your comments, suggestions and contributions are welcome! Don't hesitate to
> contact me if you have any questions.
>    

Wow, that sounds impressive. The only problem I see is the license...

-- 
Regards,
Evgeniy Khramtsov, ProcessOne.
xmpp:xram@REDACTED