[guymcarthur]

OK, so if I understand this correctly, a binary format where you can seek to arbitrary positions to read only the data you need to currently display is a huge performance win versus a big blob of text you have to read and fully parse. As someone who has had to uninstall FaceBook from my Android phone due to its poor performance, excuse me if I'm bewildered that they didn't realize this years ago (FlatBuffers isn't the first binary serialization format) and write it that way in the first place!

[oh_sigh]

Facebook(the company) values putting any functioning software out there over putting optimized software out. This is intentional, but it leads to bad experiences for people like you.

[Aardappel]

There's a lot more to it than just being binary. The big deal is that it can be accessed in-place while still being portable and forwards/backwards compatible. For example, Protocol Buffers is binary too, but requires unpacking, causing lots of object allocation, etc.

[boryas]

I'm sure your billion person social app is killing it due to awesome optimizations baked in from day one. Nicely done.