It was thus said that the Great Andrew Starks once stated:
> On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Thijs Schreijer <thijs@thijsschreijer.nl> wrote:
> >
> > Can of worms... because all other possible formats "would be nice too" as well.
>
> Perhaps a format is needed. Some sort of unholy amalgamation of an
> extension of msgpack and lua's pack/unpack (I think msgpack is little
> endian and lua's format is flexible)? Like LOM is to JSON. That has
> nothing to do with __serialize, but maybe a format specification is
> what is needed to help complete Lua's multi-threaded toolbox.
I recommend CBOR. It's documented (RFC-7049), architectural independent
and extensible (for instance, there are documented extentions for circular
references), easy to encode/decode, and relatively compact.
-spc (But I'll admit, I'm a bit biased ... )
I looked over CBOR. I don't have the chops to criticize it and it looks great to me. :) In my experience:
JSON is almost always fine, but if I'm reaching for something that I'm going to use in a Lua <=> Lua scenario, I'd want a better fit. Specifically, mixed tables are something that I wish I could do. I will often do something like `{foo = {some_object = bla}, "foo", bar = {something_else = blab}, "bar"}`, which is useful and not legal JSON. CBOR would meet that requirement, I believe.
I don't send closures over the wire. If I want to transfer code, I do so as text and use `load` in the remote lua_state. If 100% Lua data structure is required, it seems like an attainable goal. In my head I've already designed it! But I'm skeptical that something like that is required for most maintainable applications.
Most importantly, something needs to be picked. A properly extended CBOR could be canonized on some kind of Lua web site. A library or 10 could be made that supported this format. Various concurrency / Lua-verses could adopt the format. Little Lua nodes could be working together with greater ease, thanks to this and Luaproc and cqueues and Luvit and Love2D and LuaLanes and....
I think that it could be a useful addition.
-Andrew
