FlatBuffers: A Memory-Efficient Serialization Library
Ricardo Quesada
FlatBuffers stores serialized data in buffers in a cross-platform way, supporting format evolution that is fully forwards and backwards compatible through a schema. These buffers can be stored in files or sent across the network as-is, and accessed in-place without parsing overhead.
The FlatBuffers schema compiler and runtime is written in platform independent C++ with no library dependencies outside the STL, which makes it possible to use on any platform that has a C++ compiler. We have provided methods to build the FlatBuffers library, example applications, and unit tests for Android, Linux, OSX and Windows. The schema compiler can generate code to read and write FlatBuffers binary files for C++ and Java. It can additionally parse JSON-formatted data into type-safe binaries.
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