osrf-migration
commented
9 years ago Original comment by Jose Luis Rivero (Bitbucket: Jose Luis Rivero, GitHub: j-rivero).
Interesting, thanks Andrew.
Together with flatbuffers (by google) it exists something called Cap'n Proto (by protocolbuffer former developer) which seems to follow the same concept. I found useful the reading of:
I get the impression that the good old protocol buffers have been deprecated by this 'zero copy serialization' projects which are also worried about one of the biggest bottlenecks, the memory access.
Original report (archived issue) by Andrew Hundt (Bitbucket: ahundt).
I know you guys have been developing for over a year and this is probably too little, too late, but I wanted to point out some problems with protocol buffers and the replacement that was created to solve some of the exact problems that are encountered in robotics.
One of the major issues with protocol buffers in high performance systems is the substantial CPU overhead involved in packing and unpacking protobufs. Google themselves ran into this exact problem in high performance situations such as games, which have many of the same real-time requirements as robotics, particularly for multiplayer games. For this reason they created their own alternative to protobuf called flatbuffers.
https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/
Much of flatbuffers is very similar to protobuf, so it might actually be less unreasonable to move to flatbuffers than it would be for any other alternative. However, I realize less than extremely unreasonable may still be unreasonable. :-)
I'd like to hear any thoughts on this or if there is anything else useful I could add here.