Binn is a computer data serialization format used mainly for application

data transfer Data transmission and data reception or, more broadly, data communication or digital communications is the transfer and reception of data in the form of a digital bitstream or a digitized analog signal transmitted over a point-to-point o ...

. It stores

primitive data type In computer science, primitive data types are a set of basic data types from which all other data types are constructed. Specifically it often refers to the limited set of data representations in use by a particular processor, which all compiled ...

s and

data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that is usually chosen for Efficiency, efficient Data access, access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the rel ...

s in a binary form.Binn README
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Performance

The Binn format is designed to be compact and fast on readings. The elements are stored with their sizes to increase the read performance. The strings are null terminated so when read the library returns a pointer to them inside the buffer, avoiding

memory allocation Memory management is a form of resource management applied to computer memory. The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when ...

and data copying, an operation known as

zero-copy "Zero-copy" describes computer operations in which the CPU does not perform the task of copying data from one memory area to another or in which unnecessary data copies are avoided. This is frequently used to save CPU cycles and memory bandwid ...

Data types

Primitive data types: * null * boolean (true and false) * integer (up to 64 bits signed or unsigned) * floating point numbers (IEEE single/double precision) * string * blob (binary data) * User defined Containers: * list * map (numeric key

associative array In computer science, an associative array, map, symbol table, or dictionary is an abstract data type that stores a collection of (key, value) pairs, such that each possible key appears at most once in the collection. In mathematical terms an ...

) * object (text key associative array)

Format

Binn structures consist of a list of ''elements''. Each element has a type that can be followed by the size, count of internal items, and the data itself:

boolean, null:
 ype
int, float (storage: byte, word, dword or qword):
 ypedata]

string, blob:
 ypesize] ata
list, object, map:
 ypesize] ountata

Example encoding

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other s ...

data such as is serialized in binn with the same size: \xE2 // type = object (container) \x11 // container total size \x01 // items in the container (key/value pairs in this case) \x05hello // field name \xA0 // type = string \x05world\x00 // field value (null terminated)

Example code

Writing to an object in C: // create a new object binn * obj = binn_object(); // add values to it binn_object_set_int32(obj, "id", 123); binn_object_set_str(obj, "name", "John"); binn_object_set_double(obj, "total", 2.55); // send over the network or save to a file... send(sock, binn_ptr(obj), binn_size(obj)); // release the buffer binn_free(obj); Reading from that object: int id = binn_object_int32(obj, "id"); char * name = binn_object_str(obj, "name"); double total = binn_object_double(obj, "total");

Usages

LiteReplica
SQLite replication and point-in-time recovery tool.
EJDB2
Embeddable JSON Database engine C library.
GameAP
Game servers management panel.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Binn on GitHub
Data serialization formats