Although MessagePack is definitely not a drop-in replacement for JSON, it is certainly extremely useful.
Unlike JSON, you can’t just open a MessagePack file in Notepad or vim and have it make sense. It’s often not human readable. So using MessagePack to store config files probably isn’t a good idea if you or your users will ever need to read them for debugging purposes.
But as a format for something like IPC or high-performance, low-latency communication in general, MessagePack brings serious improvements over JSON.
I recently had to build an inference server that needed to be able to communicate with an API server with minimal latency.
I started with gRPC and protobuf since it’s what everyone recommends, yet after a lot of benchmarking, I found a way faster method to be serving MessagePack over HTTP with a Litestar Python server (it’s much faster than FastAPI), using msgspec for super fast MessagePack encoding and ormsgpack for super fast decoding.
Not sure how this beat protobuf and gRPC but it did. Perhaps the Python implementation is just slow. It was still faster than JSON over HTTP, however.
Unlike JSON, you can’t just open a MessagePack file in Notepad or vim and have it make sense. It’s often not human readable. So using MessagePack to store config files probably isn’t a good idea if you or your users will ever need to read them for debugging purposes.
But as a format for something like IPC or high-performance, low-latency communication in general, MessagePack brings serious improvements over JSON.
I recently had to build an inference server that needed to be able to communicate with an API server with minimal latency.
I started with gRPC and protobuf since it’s what everyone recommends, yet after a lot of benchmarking, I found a way faster method to be serving MessagePack over HTTP with a Litestar Python server (it’s much faster than FastAPI), using msgspec for super fast MessagePack encoding and ormsgpack for super fast decoding.
Not sure how this beat protobuf and gRPC but it did. Perhaps the Python implementation is just slow. It was still faster than JSON over HTTP, however.