zlacker

>>Kinran+(OP)
TIBCO Rednezvous, https://www.tibco.com/products/tibco-rendezvous, is the first thing that came to my mind from previous experience in the financial industry working with real-time market data. Although I'm not sure if it has built-in KV support for dealing with large payloads like NATS does, TIBCO RV and their related software packages are worth checking out to see what an long time established commercial product offers. Which leads me to...

... the protocol is text-based like HTTP with CR LF for field both for the client, https://docs.nats.io/reference/reference-protocols/nats-prot..., and cluster protocols, https://docs.nats.io/reference/reference-protocols/nats-serv... -- which means encoding overhead if your payloads are binary. So depending on your definition of performance, ymmv.

I really do not see how implementing an API across multiple languages is easier by making a new linefeed-based protocol, https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/blob/0421c65c888bf381..., than just using code-generated JSON or gRPC (Protobuf or Flatbuffers). One could then write subscriptions/clustering algorithms in a protocol-neutral library.

>>no_cir+xS5
I don't think there's encoding overhead. It's like http, like you said, but just like http body encoding it seems that actual payloads are preceded with their length so that you just read n followed by n bytes. Look at the docs for `pub` for example. Json would be less efficient; gRPC adds tons of complexity and overhead.

>>c-cube+6U5
Correct. Text based is more than fine these days, as long as you use length prefix so you can avoid escaping. But you do still need to parse lines which can be tricky in bare or poorly tooled environments. It’s the best trade off today, because debugging binary formats is a serious obstacle.

> Json would be less efficient; gRPC adds tons of complexity and overhead.

Indeed. There aren’t many suitable specs around, and this protocol, albeit custom, is very easy to implement. Which is proven by the fact that there are well maintained Nats clients in many different languages.