<divclass="textblock"><p>Comparing against other serialization solutions, running on Windows 7 64bit. We use the LITE runtime for Protocol Buffers (less code / lower overhead), Rapid JSON (one of the fastest C++ JSON parsers around), and pugixml, also one of the fastest XML parsers.</p>
<p>We compare against Flatbuffers with the binary wire format (as intended), and also with JSON as the wire format with the optional JSON parser (which, using a schema, parses JSON into a binary buffer that can then be accessed as before).</p>
<p>The benchmark object is a set of about 10 objects containing an array, 4 strings, and a large variety of int/float scalar values of all sizes, meant to be representative of game data, e.g. a scene format.</p>
<h3>Some other serialization systems we compared against but did not benchmark (yet), in rough order of applicability:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Cap'n'Proto promises to reduce Protocol Buffers much like FlatBuffers does, though with a more complicated binary encoding and less flexibility (no optional fields to allow deprecating fields or serializing with missing fields for which defaults exist). It currently also isn't fully cross-platform portable (lack of VS support).</li>
<li>msgpack: has very minimal forwards/backwards compatability support when used with the typed C++ interface. Also lacks VS2010 support.</li>
<li>Thrift: very similar to Protocol Buffers, but appears to be less efficient, and have more dependencies.</li>
<li>YAML: a superset of JSON and otherwise very similar. Used by e.g. Unity.</li>
<li>C# comes with built-in serialization functionality, as used by Unity also. Being tied to the language, and having no automatic versioning support limits its applicability.</li>
<li>Project Anarchy (the free mobile engine by Havok) comes with a serialization system, that however does no automatic versioning (have to code around new fields manually), is very much tied to the rest of the engine, and works without a schema to generate code (tied to your C++ class definition). </li>
