Hi all, I've made some updates to this KIP. Specifically, I wanted to avoid including escape bytes in the serialization format, since it was too complex. Also, I think this is a good opportunity to slim down our variable length fields.
best, Colin On Thu, Jul 11, 2019, at 20:52, Colin McCabe wrote: > On Tue, Jul 9, 2019, at 15:29, Jose Armando Garcia Sancio wrote: > > Thanks Colin for the KIP. For my own edification why are we doing this > > "Optional fields can have any type, except for an array of structures."? > > Why can't we have an array of structures? > > Optional fields are serialized starting with their total length. This > is straightforward to calculate for primitive fields like INT32, (or > even an array of INT32), but more difficult to calculate for an array > of structures. Basically, we'd have to do a two-pass serialization > where we first calculate the lengths of everything, and then write it > out. > > The nice thing about this KIP is that there's nothing in the protocol > stopping us from adding support for this feature in the future. We > wouldn't have to really change the protocol at all to add support. But > we'd have to change a lot of serialization code. Given almost all of > our use-cases for optional fields are adding an extra field here or > there, it seems reasonable not to support it for right now. > > best, > Colin > > > > > -- > > -Jose > > >
