A fast, zero-copy Transit-format reader and writer written in C

7 points by delaguardo

What is Transit?

Transit is a format and a set of libraries for conveying values between applications written in different languages. It is layered on top of JSON and MessagePack, so you get their tooling and speed, but with a much richer type system and built-in payload compression. Think of it as "JSON that round-trips real types":

Ground types from the host format: maps, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans, null
Extension types JSON lacks: keywords :foo, symbols, instants (timestamps), UUIDs, URIs, big integers/decimals, characters, byte arrays, sets, and lists
Built-in compression (caching): repeated map keys, keywords, symbols, and tags are written once and then referenced by a short ^N code, so verbose, key-heavy payloads shrink dramatically
Extensible via tagged values: ship your own types over the wire with a tag plus a representation, and decode them with a custom handler — no more {"__type": "Date", "value": "..."} hacks
Language-agnostic & self-describing: originally from Cognitect/Clojure, with implementations across many languages

Learn more: Official Transit specification

sebastien

It does look vibecoded, but in a clean way! Would be keen to know the process and models used. Also I think benchmarks would be good (like, how faster is the C implementation compared to JS), as I imagine the value of the C implementation is in embedding as a faster runtime (in Python, or as WASM for Web/workers).