Ask HN: What are the *technical* reasons you favor JSON over bencode? - gwu78
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CarolineW
So for those of you who, like me, didn't know what Bencode is, here's the
description from wikipedia[0]:

 _Bencode (pronounced like B encode) is the encoding used by the peer-to-peer
file sharing system BitTorrent for storing and transmitting loosely structured
data._

 _It supports four different types of values: byte strings, integers, lists,
and dictionaries (associative arrays)._

...

 _While less efficient than a pure binary encoding, bencoding is simple and
(because numbers are encoded as text in decimal notation) is unaffected by
endianness, which is important for a cross-platform application like
BitTorrent. It is also fairly flexible, as long as applications ignore
unexpected dictionary keys, so that new ones can be added without creating
incompatibilities._

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bencode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bencode)

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dozzie
Bencoding is as human-readable as MessagePack, but not as concise. I don't see
why would anybody choose bencoding _today_.

Oh, and it doesn't guarantee that your message will fit in a single line. JSON
can be encoded to a line.

