skial

My thoughts on MessagePack

Hi. My name is Sadayuki "Sada" Furuhashi. I am the author of the MessagePack serialization format as well as its implementation in C/C++/Ruby.

Recently, MessagePack made it to the front page of Hacker News with this blog entry by Olaf, the creator of the Facebook game ZeroPilot. In the comment thread, there were several criticisms for the blog post as well as MessagePack itself, and I thought this was a good opportunity for me to address the questions and share my thoughts.

My high-level response to the comments

To the best of my understanding, roughly speaking, the criticisms fell into the following two categories.

This article has been given a more permanent home on my blog. Also, since it was first written, the development of the Promises/A+ specification has made the original emphasis on Promises/A seem somewhat outdated.

You're Missing the Point of Promises

Promises are a software abstraction that makes working with asynchronous operations much more pleasant. In the most basic definition, your code will move from continuation-passing style:

getTweetsFor("domenic", function (err, results) {
 // the rest of your code goes here.

	//+ Jonas Raoni Soares Silva
	//@ http://jsfromhell.com/geral/utf-8 [v1.0]

	UTF8 = {
	encode: function(s){
	for(var c, i = -1, l = (s = s.split("")).length, o = String.fromCharCode; ++i < l;
	s[i] = (c = s[i].charCodeAt(0)) >= 127 ? o(0xc0 \| (c >>> 6)) + o(0x80 \| (c & 0x3f)) : s[i]
	);
	return s.join("");
	},

	/*
	* object.watch polyfill
	*
	* 2012-04-03
	*
	* By Eli Grey, http://eligrey.com
	* Public Domain.
	* NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
	*/

	http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/1/26/why-your-javascript-apps-need-more-structure
	http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/2/4/let-them-eat-state
	http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/3/7/the-js-model-layer
	http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/2/8/rendering-views-in-javascript


	Controllers:

	http://code.quirkey.com/sammy/ - Sammy is a tiny javascript framework built on top of jQuery. It’s RESTful Evented JavaScript.

	// Modernizr lite, unofficial. ;)

	// usage:
	//
	// testStyle('box-shadow')
	//
	// a class of `boxshadow` or `no-boxshadow` is added to the <html> element accordingly.

	function testStyle(style){

	// Example usage

	class Example
	{
	public static function test()
	{

	var bytes = new JSByteIO(new ArrayBuffer(128));

	// Writing and reading a line

	var parser = document.createElement('a');
	parser.href = "http://example.com:3000/pathname/?search=test#hash";

	parser.protocol; // => "http:"
	parser.hostname; // => "example.com"
	parser.port; // => "3000"
	parser.pathname; // => "/pathname/"
	parser.search; // => "?search=test"
	parser.hash; // => "#hash"
	parser.host; // => "example.com:3000"

	.PHONY: compile

	time=/usr/bin/time

	compile: dart typescript coffeescript haxe jsx

	dart:
	$(time) dart2js -ooutput/dart.js source/simple.dart

	typescript:

	class Escape{
	/**
	Escape HTML special characters of the string.
	&, <, >, ", ', `, , !, @, $, %, (, ), =, +, {, }, [, and ]
	**/
	public static function htmlEscape( s : String ) : String {
	return s.split("&").join("&")
	.split("<").join("<")
	.split(">").join(">")
	.split('"').join(""")