Begrudgingly Choosing CBOR over MessagePack
Published on: 2025-07-16 19:05:10
Begrudgingly choosing CBOR over MessagePack
In my pursuit of a sharable programming language, I need a suitable serialization format that's (1) performant to send/store and (2) easy to understand/implement.
In a previous essay, I crammed scrapscript into MessagePack.
After further experiments, I somehow convinced myself that this serialization format also needed to (3) commit to existing standards, (4) work overtime as a pseudo-IR, (5), and run on relatively crappy hardware.
Meanwhile, Peter Saxton (EYG) sent me a friendly email recommending CBOR as a potential alternative to MessagePack.
Uh oh -- competing standards? Marginal design tradeoffs? Open-source woes? Buckle up!
Which is cooler?
Obviously MessagePack is what cool kids would use.
Compare the subheadings on each landing page:
msgpack: "It's like JSON. but fast and small."
CBOR: "RFC 8949 Concise Binary Object Representation"
One of these formats is wearing a damn necktie.
Everything about CBOR is uncool. It was des
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