ba4a971bfa
Unecessary because unpack_/1 will throw it anyway. This does mean that we go a tiny bit deeper to find that we don't have enough data, but that should be a rare code path. Keep the main code path fast and the code clean. While at it, rename vars to match its sibling function and to avoid thinking that RestLen is a byte count (it's an item count).
MessagePack
Extremely efficient object serialization library. It's like JSON, but very fast and small.
What's MessagePack?
MessagePack is a binary-based efficient object serialization library. It enables to exchange structured objects between many languages like JSON. But unlike JSON, it is very fast and small.
Typical small integer (like flags or error code) is saved only in 1 byte, and typical short string only needs 1 byte except the length of the string itself. [1,2,3] (3 elements array) is serialized in 4 bytes using MessagePack as follows:
require 'msgpack'
msg = [1,2,3].to_msgpack #=> "\x93\x01\x02\x03"
MessagePack.unpack(msg) #=> [1,2,3]
Performance
In this test, it measured the elapsed time of serializing and deserializing 200,000 target objects. The target object consists of the three integers and 512 bytes string. The source code of this test is available from frsyuki' serializer-speed-test repository.
Getting Started
Usage and other documents about implementations in each language are found at the web site.