MessagePack Format
MessagePack is an efficient binary alternative to JSON that represents JSON-compatible structures with type tags plus compact values, producing smaller payloads than JSON with faster parsing.
Purpose
It brings binary efficiency to JSON semantics, fitting structured data transfer in APIs and caches.
Mechanism
Every value starts with a 1-byte type tag: positive/negative fixints, fixmap/fixarray/fixstr and other small values are inlined into the tag; ints use Varint, strings are length-prefixed UTF-8, and arrays/maps recurse with length prefixes.
Use cases
- Binary API responses
- Redis cache values
- Alternative to Thrift/Protobuf