[codelikeawolf]

I've been working with the VS Code codebase for the past few months and I noticed they're encoding/decoding all the IPC messages using a custom binary buffer implementation (or at least I think that's the case, some of the code is hard to follow). It struck me as odd because most of the messages are pretty small (definitely not 100s of MB). I always wondered: at what point does it become more performant to encode messages to binary and decode them on the other end? Does it really take that much longer to just send strings?

[actionfromafar]

I don't know, but I'm struck by the observation that binary formats are "just" a special case of compression.

[adammarples]

Well, they're not, they're just an efficient way of encoding a subset of data. They can't compress that data, like, for example, compressing 100 x "a", unless they have a compression algorithm attached, they will just represent "a" 100 times, but more efficiently than unicode or whatever.

[actionfromafar]

It's almost as you'd have compressed that string 100 into a single byte.