Bulldozer00's Blog

Remember this classic torture scene in “Marathon Man“? D’oh! Now, suppose you had to create the representation of a message that simply aggregates several numerical measures into one data structure:

Given no information other than the fact that some numerical computations must be performed on each individual target track attribute within your code, which implementation would you choose for your internal processing? The binary, type-safe, candidate, or the text, type-unsafe, option? If you chose the type-unsafe option, then you’d impose a performance penalty on your code every time you needed to perform a computation on your tracks. You’d have to deserialize and extract the individual track attribute(s) before implementing the computations:

If your application is required to send/receive track messages over a “wire” between processing nodes, then you’d need to choose some sort of serialization/deserialization protocol along with an over-the-wire message format. Even if you were to choose a text format (JSON, XML) for the wire, be sure to deserialize the input as soon as possible and serialize on output as late as possible. Otherwise you’ll impose an unnecessary performance hit on your code every time you have to numerically manipulate the fields in your message.

More generally….