BON - Binary Object Notation

BON is a fast, flexible, general purpose binary serialization format.

Key features:

Fully JSON compatible (both ways)
Self-identifying four-byte header
Always Unicode
Supports streaming
Supports quick browsing of huge files
Optional CRC-32 for every file
Zero-overhead read and write of 'packed' data (e.g. an array of floats). In fact, this is 10-50x faster than MessagePack!

This last point makes BON perfect for things that has lots of numeric data, like 3D models, sound, and scientific data.

They all fail in one or more of the key features listed above.

Please do! The BON format is still work in progress, and so I'm looking for any and all feedback.

The code is all open source (under the MIT license) and implementations in other languages is most welcome.

Licence

The format and code is free (as in beer and speech) under the MIT license.

> git clone https://github.com/emilk/bon.git
> cd bon/build
> cmake .. && make && make install

I have written a C library implementation of BON which you can read about here.

In addition, I have written some tools for inspecting .bon files, as well as converting between BON and JSON.