Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP70: why Google Protocol Buffers for encoding?

From: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 11:04:58 -0500

Not to mention the tiresome and error-prone task of writing your own
JSON-to-schema marshalling code -- or something equivalent to the protobufs
compiler and libs for JSON.

protobufs -- and its modern competitors such as msgpack -- natively provide
type support in a way that must be hacked into JSON or XML.

The protobuf/msgpack design is engineered to avoid bugs routinely found in
JSON parsing code; due to the amount of code & effort involved in JSON
input sanity checking, bugs and inconsistencies inevitable arise.  We have
seen this in bitcoind with JSON-RPC.

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Mike Hearn <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On the other hand, if you charge the developer (and not the plateform) to
>> check certificate validity, it means that you have to develop a different
>> codebase for all plateform you are targeting, because each plateform store
>> trusted root certificate in a different manner with different APIs, and
>> also have different types representing a X509 Certificate.
>>
>
> That's what cross-platform abstraction libraries are for. Both Java and Qt
> provide a key store library that can load from either the OS root store or
> a custom one. If your chosen app platform doesn't, OK, then you'll have to
> make or find one yourself. Perhaps contribute it upstream or make it a
> library. But that's not a limitation of BIP70.
>
> Just as a reminder, there is no obligation to use the OS root store. You
> can (and quite possibly should) take a snapshot of the Mozilla/Apple/MSFT
> etc stores and load it in your app. We do this in bitcoinj by default to
> avoid cases where BIP70 requests work on some platforms and not others,
> although the developer can easily override this and use the OS root store
> instead.
>
> Of all possible solutions, using a third party service to convert things
> to JSON is one of the least obvious and highest effort. I don't know anyone
> else who arrived at such a conclusion and respectfully disagree that this
> is a problem with the design choices in BIP70. It sounds like a bizarre
> hack around lack of features in whatever runtime you're using.
>
>
>
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-- 
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/