[flipperypokery]

I feel as though the people in this thread against (well-designed) binary protocols have never tried implementing a binary protocol.

Length-prefixed fields and direct encoding of binary data go a long way to simplifying implementing a protocol.

The ease of implementation of a simple binary protocol should not be underrated.

[sergiosgc]

It's not just the binary. It's that HTTP 2 is hugely more complex. Excessive complexity is a general engineering smell. It can't be all that difficult to implement a protocol for applying a few verbs to URIs.

Complex + non-discoverable = bad engineering

[pbsdp]

HTTP is already painfully complex to implement correctly. It's also a terribly wasteful and poor engineered protocol for anything other than fetching documents.

[jimktrains2]

> It's also a terribly wasteful and poor engineered protocol for anything other than fetching documents.

I wonder if that was the original purpose of the protocol;)

[sergiosgc]

Those who do not know History are doomed to repeat it. Back in the day of the OSI stack, the telecom guys were huge fans of binary protocols. The arguments were exactly those described here on HN: they're easier to implement; with the right tooling, they're just as readable; they're more efficient.

The fact is, on the application layer, text based protocols wiped the floor with binary protocols. The answer is in the little details, which everyone knows is where the devil spends its time. They are not easier to implement, because they're more difficult to debug (and because text parsers are, let's be honest, a solved problem); they are not as readable, because debug tooling is never perfectly implemented and never ever present in every system; they are more efficient, but at this layer the efficiency does not pay off (i.e. the size of the HTTP header leading that 5MB image does not really matter).

One of the comments here pulled a comparison I did not remember any more: SS7 vs SIP. Go and have a look at both protocols. They are both mature, so you don't really need to wait for the fantastic debug tooling to appear. Study both ecosystems and then form your opinion on binary vs text application protocols.

[flipperypokery]

Those who don't understand history are doomed to misinterpret its lessons.

Do you remember the OSI binary protocols as designed back in the day?

ASN.1 as far as the eye could see. OIDs. MIBs. Loosely defined extensibility. Terrible, complex protocol designs.

This had nothing to do with the protocols being binary or text; the protocols themselves were painfully complex, making it difficult and frustrating to write a working implementation, much less a complete and interoperating implementations.

> ... at this layer the efficiency does not pay off (i.e. the size of the HTTP header leading that 5MB image does not really matter).

"I don't care about RTT time, the lack of bidirectional communication, and the inability to inline binary data in the protocol stream" ... said no mobile/wireless/desktop developer, ever.

> One of the comments here pulled a comparison I did not remember any more: SS7 vs SIP.

I've implemented SIP. It was a massive hassle because it was text-based and annoying and difficult to parse. The available SIP libraries tend to be buggy and incomplete, and people actually pay for workable SIP stacks. I'd rather not look at SIP ever again.

That isn't to say SS7 is better, it doesn't appear to be. As far as I can tell, that's because it was badly designed, not because of a flaw inherent in using binary encodings.

[lstamour]

> "I don't care about RTT time, the lack of bidirectional communication, and the inability to inline binary data in the protocol stream" ... said no mobile/wireless/desktop developer, ever.

+1

http://www.igvita.com/slides/2013/breaking-1s-mobile-barrier... if you want to read about this from a mobile perspective.

[jimktrains2]

Easy to implement in C, perhaps, but not Python, PERL, and the ilk. Most importantly, it's not as easy to do it with a shell and nc to build a simple server.

[lucian1900]

Implementing binary protocols in Python is quite easy. I'll take length-prefixed and encoding-tagged binaries over "text" any day.