[SV_BubbleTime]

I was instantly suspicious that a “new better format” for serialization didn’t open with the input/output. And this is why (fucking lol, gtfo):

    Q^mSat,3^b:d+s+E,4Fri,3^u:h+k+u,6Thu,3^P:j+

If you are effectively going binary, do it. CBOR or Protobuf or any dozen other binary serializations that would be far more efficient.

The author claims this is because of copy and pasting… cool, remind me what BASE64 is again?

[creationix]

It is also a format that can be read as-is without any preprocessing. In some cases base64 can do that, and this format does make heavy use of base64 varints.

Sure, you can encode as JSON, then compress with gzip and then base64 encode. You'll probably end up with something smaller than rx and be extremely safe to copy-paste. But your consumers are going to consume orders of magnitude more CPU reading data from this document.

RX is usable as-is, is compressed, and is copy-pasteable. It's the unique combination of properties that makes it interesting.

[SV_BubbleTime]

>It is also a format that can be read as-is without any preprocessing.

>Q^mSat,3^b:d+s+E,4Fri,3^u:h+k+u,6Thu,3^P:j+

My man… no. I have no doubt you could kind of figure out what that sample is hot off the heels of writing this, and likely not in six months. And to consider that anyone else would fill their brain with the rules to decipher that, Nah 2.0.

[creationix]

I meant computers can read it without any preprocessing. It's random access. You don't need to parse it, you don't need to decompress it. You just start at the end and follow pointers till you get to the desired value.

Even a trivial doc like this is challenging for me to read as a human.

[112233]

But... what sort of storage device does not allow your computers to use all 256 byte values? Why is random access data stored on teletype?

[creationix]

> what sort of storage device does not allow your computers to use all 256 byte values

- clipboards

- logs

- terminal output

- alerts

- yaml configs

- JSON configs

- hacker news comments

- markdown documentation

- etc...

I assure you, this is not a solution looking for a problem. I started out with binary encodings first, but then realized it limits so many workflows.

[hombre_fatal]

Ick, why are you talking to another person like this?

> Nah.com, fam.