What are the limitations(minuses) have binary serialization than XML, CSV, etc?
And can you explain?
What are the limitations(minuses) have binary serialization than XML, CSV, etc? And can you
Share
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
What are the limitations(minuses) have binary serialization than XML, CSV, etc?
And can you explain?
Unix and the Web are (historically) favoring textual formats (XML, JSON, YAML, …) and protocols (HTTP, SMTP, …), because they are easier to debug (and to understand) since you can use textual tools and editors on them. Many library functions (e.g.
fscanfandfprintf…) are favoring textual formats.And several tools are probably biased for textual files (whatever that means exactly). For instance, a textual file can probably be more efficiently managed under a version control system like
gitorsvnetc… (and thediffandpatchutilities are expecting textual data, with newlines to separate lines).A possible disadvantage of textual format is that it may take more CPU time to encode/decode, and more disk space. (However disk space is cheap, textual data is compressible, and the bottleneck is the real I/O).
If you want compatibility of your binary data across various processors or compilers (or systems), you should explicitly take care of it, using “neutral” data formats like XDR or ASN1 and serialization libraries (e.g. s11n).