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by kentonv 3791 days ago
> Any link to where I can read about that encoding style in more details?

Hmm, I'm not aware of any literature other than what's on the Cap'n Proto web site. You can of course find the Cap'n Proto encoding documented here:

https://capnproto.org/encoding.html

The format is, of course, a lot like how in-memory data structures are laid out in C (fields of a struct have fixed offsets; variable-size fields are behind pointers). Unlike native pointers, though, Cap'n Proto's pointers are designed to be relocatable and easy to bounds-check, and they contain just enough type information for the message to be minimally self-describing (so that you can e.g. make a copy of a particular sub-object without knowing its schema).