Text formats such as XML or JSON are far less deterministic, are more loosely specified, have wide variance in parsing, are not very hash-able, the list goes on. On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Richard Brady wrote: > Hi Gavin, Mike and co > > Is there a strong driver behind the choice of Google Protocol Buffers for > payment request encoding in BIP-0070? > > Performance doesn't feel that relevant when you think that: > 1. Payment requests are not broadcast, this is a request / response flow, > much more akin to a web request. > 2. One would be cramming this data into a binary format just so you can > then attach it to a no-so-binary format such as HTTP. > > Some great things about protocols/encodings such as HTTP/JSON/XML are: > 1. They are human readable on-the-wire. No Wireshark plugin required, > tcpdump or ngrep will do. > 2. There are tons of great open source libraries and API for parsing / > manipulating / generating. > 3. It's really easy to hand-craft a test message for debugging. > 4. The standards are much easier to read and write. They don't need to > contain code like BIP-0070 currently does and they can contain examples, > which BIP70 does not. > 5. They are thoroughly specified by independent standards bodies such as > the IETF. Gotta love a bit of MUST / SHOULD / MAY in a standard. > 6. They're a family ;-) > > Keen to hear your thoughts on this and very keen to watch the payment > protocol grow regardless of encoding choice! My background is SIP / VoIP > and I think that could be a fascinating use case for this protocol which > I'm hoping to do some work on. > > Best, > Richard > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. > GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. > Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. > Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet > _______________________________________________ > Bitcoin-development mailing list > Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development > > -- Jeff Garzik Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist BitPay, Inc. https://bitpay.com/