Protocol Buffers Alternatives

YAML is a human-readable data serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data are being stored or transmitted. YAML targets many of the same communications applications as Extensible Markup Language (XML) but has a minimal...

TOML aims to be a minimal configuration file format that's easy to read due to obvious semantics. TOML is designed to map unambiguously to a hash table. TOML should be easy to parse into data structures in a wide variety of languages.

Thrift is a lightweight, language-independent software stack for point-to-point RPC implementation. Thrift provides clean abstractions and implementations for data transport, data serialization, and application level processing.

MessagePack is an efficient binary serialization specification that lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON but quicker and with a lower overhead.

Apache Avro™ is a data serialization system. Avro provides: A compact, fast, binary data format. A container file, to store persistent data. Remote procedure call (RPC).

The eno notation language is a plain-text data format designed for file-based content. The language itself is very simple but expressive enough to be able to handle massive databases, while libraries are available across multiple languages including JavaScript, Python, Ruby and...