Packing Binary Is Fun
A developer explores the process of creating a custom binary format to optimize data storage, demonstrating how to represent strings and integers more efficiently than JSON. The article provides a technical walkthrough of byte-level data manipulation.
Why it matters
Understanding binary serialization is fundamental for high-performance computing and reducing bandwidth costs in data-heavy applications.
I saw someone on twitter arguing that saving data in JSON was apparently not what Real™ developers do.
Obviously, I had to become a Real™ Developer too.
“How hard could it be to make my own binary format?”
I ended up building an entire binary schema language that can shrink JSON payloads by 80%.
"hello world" then it would be translated in ascii to
104 101 108 108 111 32 119 111 114 108 100 h e l l o [SPACE] w o r l d So h becomes 104 in ASCII.
Since these ASCII values fit within 8 bits, each character takes up 1 byte.
h e l 01101000 01100101 01101100 l o [SPACE] 01101100 01101111 00100000 w o r 01110111 01101111 01110010 l d 01101100 01100100 so we can just write it using a lil bitta c:
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