Re: A value for "nothing"

[HiPhish <hiphish@posteo.de>]

The main advantage of JSON is that it is human-readable. This is great if you 
want to save the data on disc and be able to get it without needing special 
software, or if you want to write it out by hand but be able to parse it by a 
computer. I actually had done that, I maintained a number of records by hand 
and use a small script to splice the data in a modified form into a LaTeX 
document.

However, being text-based becomes a liability when there is no need for human 
readability. For instance, if you want to send data between processes there 
will never be a human who will eyeball it, size and parsing efficiency are 
much more important. JSON is non-trivial to parse.

I am writing this implementation of MessagePack because I want to be able to 
write a Neovim client for Guile. This will effectively allow writing Neovim 
plugins in Guile: Neovim launches an external Guile process and the two 
processes communicate via RPC using MessagePack as the protocol. This way 
Neovim can be retrofitted with any language for writing plugins; old Vim 
needed be be compiled with support for foreign scripting languages baked into 
the binary.