[nly]

It's all trade-offs.

Flatbuffers trades off encoding speed, programmer ergonomics and binary size (it produces many bytes and it's awkward and still pretty slow to encode) for decoding speed (almost a no-op if you forego buffer verification, which you shouldn't most of the time). Imho it's not a good choice for network wire formats, but for storage it's pretty good.

[remus]

Agreed. Given the number of serialization formats available at this point, it feels like anything that doesn't start off with a discussion of the trade offs they've made and how this affects the various aspects of performance is a bit of a red flag that they're not actually bringing anything novel to the table.