[frsyuki]

Disclaimer: I'm authoer of MessagePack for C++/Ruby and committer of one for Java.

As for strings, JSON has to allocate memory and copy to deserialize strings because strings are escaped.

MessagePack does't have to allocate/copy because the serialized format of strings is same as the format in memory. But it depends on the implementation whether actually it doesn't allocate/copy.

C++ and Ruby implementations try to suppress allocation and copying (zero-copy). But Java implementation doesn't support zero-copy feature so far (we have plan to do so. Here is "TODO" comment: https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack-java/blob/master/src/main...).

As for the other types, C++ implementation (and new Ruby implementation which is under development) has memory pool which optimizes those memory allocations petterns. But it's hard to implement such optimizations for Java because JVM (and Dalvik VM) doesn't allow to hook object allocation.

[TheRevoltingX]

Interesting, thanks so much for the response. I'll keep this in mind as I continue to develop my app. It's still between custom byte stream, json, thrift, etc.

But MsgPack looks interesting as well and, if anything, these blog posts have brought it into the light for me.

I looked at the java class and what might help is if you can set a buffer size and use that buffer to store the data in the buffer and expand it if necessary. But that seems like a lot of work. But yeah, not sure if you can optimize based on usage patterns due to the constraint you said. In any case, great stuff and thanks for the info.