gokr / Protobuf

Google came up with a compact binary serialization library called Protocol Buffers.

It's a PITA to implement and it is not self described (the receiver must have the .proto definition of the messages to know exactly what types some stuff actually is) and not very detailed documented, but fairly.

NOTE: Currently this implementation is not complete, the wire level is probabl 95% done. There is no .proto parser or similar yet.

In general I think its a bad idea, and MsgPack which often is touted as a better scheme (which it probably is - since it is self described) is probably not much better. Note though that MsgPack is already implemented in Smalltalk.

Personally I would just use JSON with perhaps a bit of compression on top. :)