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Code Issues Releases Wiki Activity

Wording cleanup

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Bradlee Speice 2019-09-27 23:36:38 -04:00
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_posts/2019-09-01-binary-format-shootout.md
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@ -22,9 +22,8 @@ Given these requirements, the formats I could find were:
1. [Cap'n Proto](https://capnproto.org/) has been around the longest, and integrates well with all the build tools
2. [Flatbuffers](https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/) is the newest, and claims to have a simpler encoding
3. [Simple Binary Encoding](https://github.com/real-logic/simple-binary-encoding) is being adopted by the
[High-performance financial](https://www.fixtrading.org/standards/sbe/) community, but the Rust implementation
is essentially unmaintained
3. [Simple Binary Encoding](https://github.com/real-logic/simple-binary-encoding) has the simplest encoding,
but the Rust implementation is essentially unmaintained
Any one of these will satisfy the project requirements: easy to transmit over a network, reasonably fast,
and support multiple languages. But actually picking one to build a system on is intimidating; it's impossible
@ -110,11 +109,9 @@ all the boring code by hand.
# Part 1: Cap'n Proto
Now it's time to get into the meaty part of the story. Cap'n Proto was the first format I tried because of how long
it has supported Rust. It was a bit tricky to get the compiler installed, but once that was done, the
[schema document](https://github.com/bspeice/speice.io-md_shootout/blob/369613843d39cfdc728e1003123bf87f79422497/marketdata.capnp)
wasn't hard to create.
In practice, I had a ton of issues with Cap'n Proto.
it has supported Rust (thanks to [David Renshaw](https://github.com/dwrensha) for maintaining the Rust port since
[2014!](https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto-rust/releases/tag/rustc-0.10)). However, I had a ton of performance concerns
actually using of Cap'n Proto.
To serialize new messages, Cap'n Proto uses a "builder" object. This builder allocates memory on the heap to hold the message
content, but because builders [can't be re-used](https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto-rust/issues/111), we have to allocate
@ -124,11 +121,11 @@ but it required reading through Cap'n Proto's [benchmarks](https://github.com/ca
to find an example and using `transmute` to bypass Rust's borrow checker.
Reading messages is better, but still had issues. Cap'n Proto has two message encodings: a ["packed"](https://capnproto.org/encoding.html#packing)
version, and an unpacked version. When reading "packed" messages, we need a buffer to unpack the message into before we can use it;
version, and an "unpacked" version. When reading "packed" messages, we need a buffer to unpack the message into before we can use it;
Cap'n Proto allocates a new buffer to unpack the message every time, and I wasn't able to figure out a way around that.
In contrast, the unpacked message format should be where Cap'n Proto shines; its main selling point is that there's [no decoding step](https://capnproto.org/).
However, accomplishing this required copying code from the private API ([since fixed](https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto-rust/issues/148)),
and we still allocate a vector on every read for the segment table.
However, accomplishing zero-copy deserialization required copying code from the private API ([since fixed](https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto-rust/issues/148)),
and we still allocate a vector on every read for the segment table (not fixed at time of writing).
In the end, I put in significant work to make Cap'n Proto as fast as possible in the tests, but there were too many issues
for me to feel comfortable using it long-term.
@ -162,7 +159,7 @@ Second, streaming support in Flatbuffers seems to be something of an [afterthoug
Where Cap'n Proto in Rust handles reading messages from a stream as part of the API, Flatbuffers just puts a `u32` at the front of each
message to indicate the size. Not specifically a problem, but I would've rather seen message size integrated into the underlying format.
Ultimately, I enjoyed using Flatbuffers, and had to do significantly less work to make it fast.
Ultimately, I enjoyed using Flatbuffers, and had to do significantly less work to make it perform well.
# Final Results