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Fleece

Fleece is a binary encoding for semi-structured data. Its data model is a superset of JSON, adding support for binary values. It is designed to be:

• Very fast to read: No parsing is needed, and the data can be navigated and read without any heap allocation. Fleece objects are internal pointers into the raw data. Arrays and dictionaries can be random-accessed. Performance on real-world-scale data has been clocked at 20x that of JSON. (Want proof? See the benchmark.)
• Compact: Simple values will be about the same size as JSON. Complex ones may be much smaller, since repeated values, especially strings, only need to be stored once.
• Efficient to convert into native objects: Numbers are binary, strings are raw UTF-8 without quoting, binary data is not base64-encoded. Storing repeated values once means they only need to be converted into native objects once.
• Appendable: Fleece is what's known as a persistent data structure. A Fleece document can be mutated by appending data to it. The mutation is in effect a delta, so it's usually much smaller than the original document. And the original document is unchanged, which is great for concurrency as well as (simple) version control.

What You Get

• Documentation, including
  • High-level API guide "Using Fleece"
  • The design document, with details on the data format
  • An example showing the details of the encoding of a specific data structure, and a walkthrough of what happens when a program works with the resulting Fleece objects
  • Some older performance figures based on the included test suite, including comparisons to JSON parsing using Apple's Foundation framework
• A C++ reference implementation, including:
  • Encoder and decoder/accessors
  • Extensions for converting JSON directly to Fleece or vice versa
  • Extensions for encoding from and decoding to Objective-C (Foundation) object trees
  • Extensions for mutable values, making it easy to modify Fleece documents and then save them again
  • Extensions for delta compression
  • Unit tests
  • Some simple performance benchmarks
• C++ and C APIs
• A command-line tool, fleece, that can convert JSON to Fleece or vice versa, or dump Fleece data in a human-readable form that shows the internal structure
• Some experimental stuff:
  • A Hash-Array-Mapped Trie implementation for building highly scaleable persistent hash tables in Fleece
  • At the other extreme, an extremely compact binary tree of strings that might find a use someday

FAQ

Q: Why does the world need yet another binary JSON encoding?
A: Excellent question, sock puppet! Fleece is different from BSON, PSON, etc. in that it's been carefully designed to not need parsing. In performance tests with other binary formats I found that, while they were faster to parse than JSON, the total time was still dominated by allocating and freeing the resulting objects, as well as the conversion from UTF-8 data to platform strings. (I was using Objective-C, but similar issues would arise if using STL or GLib or other collection frameworks.) The way around this is to structure the encoded data more like a memory dump, with "pointers" (relative byte offsets) and fixed-width random-accessible arrays. That's what Fleece does. As a result, it's many times faster to work with than JSON; literally 20x faster in the included benchmark run on a Macbook Pro.

Q: Can I use it in $LANGUAGE? [where $LANGUAGE not in ("C++", "C")]
Not currently. It would be very nice to more bindings, and the C API should make that fairly straightforward since it's easy to call from other languages. (But any real API should follow the language's idioms, instead of being a direct translation!)

Q: Why didn't you write this in $NEW_LANGUAGE instead of crufty C++?
A: I probably should have! $NEW_LANGUAGE is deservedly attracting a lot of attention for its combination of safety, readable syntax, and support for modern programming paradigms. I've been trying out $NEW_LANGUAGE and want to write more code in it. But for this I chose C++ because it's supported on all platforms, lots of people know how to use it, and it still supports high-level abstractions (unlike C.)

Q: Why did you only benchmark it against Cocoa's Foundation classes? Those are slow.
Because Foundation is what I know and work with. I'd love to incorporate benchmarks of other frameworks; please send a pull request.

Q: Why the name "Fleece"?
A: It's a reference to the mythical Golden Fleece, the treasure sought by Jason and the Argonauts.

Q: Who wrote this?
Jens Alfke, with design input from Volker Mische and Dave Rigby, and much help with portability and bug-fixing from Jim Borden. (And thanks to Mark Nunberg for the excellent jsonsl parser.)

Status

Fleece is in active use and development. It is a core component of Couchbase Lite 2.0, via the LiteCore library.

Requirements / Compatibility

• Fleece builds with Xcode, Clang, GCC and MSVC, with C++11 or later. (Yes, there are some Objective-C++ source files (.mm), but those are only used to provide Objective-C glue and Mac/iOS specific benchmarks. You can ignore them on other platforms.)
• There are no dependencies on any external libraries, other than the standard C library and the C++ STL.
• It should work correctly, and create interoperable data, on both little-endian and big-endian CPUs, but admittedly we are not currently testing or using Fleece on any big-endian platforms.

We use Travis and Appveyor for CI, covering Clang, GCC, Xcode and MSVC on macOS, Linux and Windows. If you encounter portability problems, please file an issue and we'll fix it.

License

Apache 2.0