[kainosnoema]

MessagePack in Node isn't much more than bindings to the C++ library (https://github.com/pgriess/node-msgpack/blob/master/src/msgp...). For me the bottom line was "What's faster in Node, for my project, right now?", and the answer was JSON.

There are benefits to MessagePack that have already been mentioned here, namely not having to base64 binary data first (smaller size), but that's true for any binary message format. I'd love to see some other binary formats thrown into the ring and see how they compare to MessagePack in both size efficiency and encode/decode performance. BSON seems like an interesting option, but I don't know enough about it to comment...

[andrewvc]

True, but, optimization is tricky, and you can say the say thing about ruby's messagepack and JSON libraries, where the speed difference is reversed. I, unfortunately don't have the time to go digging as to why, but there's a discrepancy somewhere.