"The Cap’n Proto encoding is appropriate both as a data interchange format and an in-memory representation, so once your structure is built, you can simply write the bytes straight out to disk!"

https://capnproto.org/

1) Why didn't I know about this??
2) Why did I have to learn about this because of an article about the authors gamer/geek mansion?

@buherator I’ve always thought protobufs was cool but this seems much more practical. If I understand it, it generates c++ code for the structure to be interchanged?

@acsawdey I haven't tried it but that seems reasonable (also, protobuf works in a similar fashion iirc)

@acsawdey Just saw your profile, would be really curios how this works on IBMs BE platforms!

@buherator We have instructions for that, as he says. If the code is in any idiom the compiler can recognize as “swapping byte order” it should turn out fine. There is very little IBM power BE Linux any more, after POWER8 came out with good support to do LE, all the major distros supported it. At this point they’ve all discontinued BE.

@acsawdey I'm also thinking about using this as a compat layer between e.g. IBMi/PASE and x86. Feels like it'd match pretty well with IBMi's SLS too?