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Alex Thompson

05/16/2022, 5:29 PM
I'm working on a unification of programming languages, databases and network protocols by starting with the serialization. https://github.com/bintoca/dbuf
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Alex Cruise

05/17/2022, 12:01 AM
if only serialization were one of the hard parts 😕
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Alex Thompson

05/17/2022, 1:57 AM
@Alex Cruise Agreed its not the hard part but I feel leaving it to the end breeds fragmentation and becomes an obstacle to interoperability
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Tom Larkworthy

05/17/2022, 10:13 AM
The main gain of dbuf over protobuf is self-describing, are you aware of gRPC reflection? https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/server-reflection.md (protobuffer can do it too but its not well documented)
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Alex Cruise

05/17/2022, 4:10 PM
I use msgpack.org at my day job (it was originally created by one of our founders), it also has that property 🙂
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Alex Thompson

05/17/2022, 5:55 PM
@Tom Larkworthy That’s a nice help tool but my goal is to go much further. Instead of having dedicated endpoints that each accept a specific data layout, have a server that could natively understand requests of different shapes.
@Alex Cruise Since you brought up out of the tar pit in a different channel, that is where I’m going with this. Using the same type system for the wire, relations, indexes, cached intermediate values and having it all be more runtime adaptive.
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Alex Cruise

05/17/2022, 6:14 PM
You might be interested in the various WebAssembly efforts to standardize struct/reference/complex types
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Alex Thompson

05/17/2022, 6:35 PM
I have followed the progress of the GC proposal. I think its going to have limited usefulness as it tries to cater to a wide variety of type systems
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Alex Cruise

05/17/2022, 6:36 PM
My snarky impression is they’re reinventing IDL and large parts of the JVM but apparently there are enough people involved who have been around awhile that they have a decent shot at success 😕
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Alex Thompson

05/17/2022, 7:16 PM
Yeah there's plenty of talent involved. I guess part of what makes any big system is just belief