In this case, I’m talking about better than JSON. JSON was invented as an alternative to XML which was invented as a way for computers to send data in a human readable form. Unfortunately XML is a pretty bloated format. Putting data into XML can make it five or six times larger.

Plus by the time XML was coming into common use in the mid-late 90s, there was a horrible letter soup of associated acronyms. It sort of appeared at the same time as Java and the whole XML ecosystem was lapped up by big business. JSON was born as an alternative method and it became very popular as JavaScript was growing at the same time, JSON is short for JavaScript Object Notation.

Now there’s MessagePack an alternative to JSON. It’s supposed to be faster and smaller than JSON. I came across it while looking at SignalR, a way to send data between clients and servers and used in Blazor and .NET websites.  It must have been around for a while as it was used back in 2011.

There’s now 50 programming language implementations including C at the bottom of the MessagePack home page although there’s over 100 but that includes several implementations for the same language.

If you have to move data between two computers, or maybe two processes on the same computer, you want it to be as small as possible and that’s what MessagePack allows.