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Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

Why do you single out avro & not any of the hundreds of other ser/de systems? Is that what you know best? Is there something specific about avro that makes it feel particularly similar? https://github.com/maximveksler/awesome-serialization

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People keep inventing new ones because the old ones suck or they think the old ones suck. Look at all the discontents around JSON (no comments!), people react violently when people try to apply a little extra like JSON-LD. Then there are all the things like YAML, TOML and such that try to be a little better but are widely thought to be a little worse. (And that's just the human readable data formats) Then there is always

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1

which is forgotten but not gone.

Oh man ASN.1, makes me shiver, oh the memories…

I hadn’t thought about it in like a decade but yeah it’s still silently in the background…

In fairness, in the list you link to,

- Avro and Ion are the only two that are labeled Textual/Binary

- They are in the same Big Data grouping

- They both are schema-embedded, and support some rich nested datastructures, though they deviate on many of the specifics

So I think it's reasonable to pick out Avro as an especially similar point of comparison.

I work in an a shop where Kafka and Avro are everywhere. If I worked someone else I might make reference to something else if it was front-of-mind all the time.

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