[Communitivity]

For your own sanity, please stay away from Flatbuffers. The key here is 'doesn't do parsing'. I used it, and wound up writing a ton of extract code to unpack things in the way I wanted. Behind the scenes everything in FlatBuffers is stored in a byte array or byte buffer. It can be made to work, but protobuffs worked better for me.

Caveats:

1) I needed to work in C++ and Java

2) I was transporting serialized messages over ZeroMQ

[kortex]

At one point I dug a bit into the python impl of Flatbuffers, and while I forget the exact details, I was struck by how inefficient it looked. Basically every accessor call requires parsing/casting (into python) bytes into objects, without any awareness of whether it had been parsed before.