Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zbendefy 316 days ago
How different is CBOR compared to BSON? Both seem to be binary json-like representations.

Edit: BSON seems to contain more data types than JSON, and as such it is more complex, whereas CBOR doesn't add to JSON's existing structure.
2 comments
EdSchouten 316 days ago
That's not entirely true: with CBOR you can add custom data types through custom tags. A central registry of them is here:

https://www.iana.org/assignments/cbor-tags/cbor-tags.xhtml

This is, for example, used by IPLD (https://ipld.io) to express references between objects through native types (https://github.com/ipld/cid-cbor/).

link
maxbond 316 days ago
I think parsing BSON is simpler than parsing JSON, BSON has additional types but the top level is always a document. Whereas the following are all valid JSON:

- `null`

- `"hello"`

- `[1,2,NaN]`

Additionally, BSON will just tell you what the type of a field is. JSON requires inferring it.

link
zokier 316 days ago
NaN is not part of JSON by any spec. Top level scalar values were disallowed by RFC 4627.
link
maxbond 316 days ago
Fair enough. I'm not sure how much JSON parsers in the wild care about that spec. I just tried with Python and it was happy to accept scalars and NaN. JavaScript rejected NaN but was happy to accept a scalar. But sure, compliant parsers can disregard those cases.
link