[z3t4]

I want to use something like flat buffers in NodeJS for optimizing websocket traffic and implementing a FS database. But I cant find much stuff for it in JavaScript. Do you (de)serialize the flat buffers or use them directly by abstracting get/set for example via Object.defineProperty ?

[gcirino42]

Google included a complete example of how to (de)serialize data with them, as well as generating the accessor functions for JS. See https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/flatbuffers_guide_use_j...

No, I don't try to decode them directly if I can avoid it. We handrolled a C-based byte packer for our honeybadger project only because function access is relatively slow on the interpreter we have on low end TVs, but reading blocks through a Uint8Array is pretty fast. Writeup is here: http://alifetodo.blogspot.com/2016/05/project-honeybadger-pi... . I can push the C packer to github if there's interest, but since you mention NodeJS, you might have better luck with Paulson's benchmark NodeJS example: https://github.com/michaelbpaulson/flatbuffers-benchmarks

[z3t4]

On consideration I don't think flat buffers is worth the added complexity. Using basically C structs is sure faster, and suitable for low end devices and clients written in C. But JSON have many advantages.