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Biniou [difficulty = 1 camel]

Introduction

Biniou (pronounced "be new") is a binary data format designed for speed, safety, ease of use and backward compatibility as protocols evolve. Biniou is vastly equivalent to JSON in terms of functionality but allows implementations several times faster (4 times faster than yojson), with 25-35% space savings.

Biniou data can be decoded into human-readable form without knowledge of type definitions except for field and variant names which are represented by 31-bit hashes. A program named bdump is provided for routine visualization of biniou data files.

The program atdgen can be used to derive OCaml-Biniou serializers and deserializers from type definitions.

Biniou format specification

The biniou format is specified here.

Library documentation

Documentation of the biniou library

Download

This software was written by Martin Jambon. It is distributed under a BSD license. The current version is 1.0.0; see Changes.

You can install this library from GODI or manually:

Latest version: biniou.tar.gz biniou.tar.bz2 biniou-1.0.0.tar.gz biniou-1.0.0.tar.bz2
biniou-0.9.0.tar.gz biniou-0.9.0.tar.bz2
biniou-0.9.1.tar.gz biniou-0.9.1.tar.bz2

The development version of Biniou is now hosted on GitHub.