Protocol Update v5

[chakrit]

Have you seen: https://gist.github.com/frsyuki/5432559

TL;DR: There has been discussion over the problem with correctly differentiating string and binary in msgpack and so the owner has proposed a new spec with included built-in string support.

So wanna know your thoughts on this. Wether you will consider supporting it?

---

Want to back this issue? Place a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[chakrit]

Official spec: https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack/blob/master/spec.md

[creationix]

Is this official and all msgpack implementations need to migrate to it? Or is it an official proposal to create a new incompatible format? It looks like it breaks some backwards compat, but I'm not entirely sure.

[chakrit]

@creationix yes tim, it's meant to be incompatible in order to fix the string vs binary issue and yeah i think it's official now that the spec file in msgpack/msgpack itself is updated (i.e. not a proposal anymore, real specs now)

[creationix]

My modifications fixed the string vs binary issue without breaking any backwards compatibility. Oh well.

But even if this new format is official, I imagine it will take a while for existing systems to upgrade to the new format since it's a breaking change. There will be a need for this implementation for a while longer I think.

[chakrit]

Should I just fork and publish a new npm module instead? Or maybe stuck this in a branch somewhere besides master.

[creationix]

I guess publish your own. Both versions need to coexist.

I'm afraid this new version of the spec won't take off since it's incompatible. Remember what happened with python 3? And this case is worse because it's a network protocol and data format requiring interoperability between systems. Is there an official upgrade plan?

[chakrit]

I think this is in a better position than Python 3 tho, since it doesn't require code changes to existing application. They just need to upgrade all the msgpack modules they use that are talking to each other. And I think people just use it mostly for internal communication between their app components? For talking to 3rd party I think most just sticks to JSON anyway.

And there's the string vs binary problem. So i think new implementers will definitely pick this new version over the old one.

[chakrit]

Pushed https://npmjs.org/package/msgpack-js-v5