Glad to see that university CS education is still deeply confused about the most basic things (this picture is real and comes directly from a former robotics student of mine)
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Replying to @its_bvisness
each one of those 3 billion devices running Java right at this moment are so lucky that they can read the magical binary format that Java alone can achieve. Meanwhile all other languages have to communicate via text files because binary is absolutely platform dependant!

Nov 1, 2025 · 2:48 AM UTC

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Replying to @andrepiske @its_bvisness
Isn't like 95% of all CPUs made the last 2-3 decades little endian? So floats and ints shouldn't be a big issue. Strings are a bit worse, length or /0 based, and all the fsking encoding options (but those are a hassle even in text based data transfer protocols).
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interesting, I didn't know little endianness was so vastly deployed! Yeah that surely makes things a little easier. And for some reason I assumed ARM was big endian, but turns out it's not.
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Replying to @andrepiske @its_bvisness
Bullshit. Just use XDR for binary exchange. Not tied to Java.
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yeah but then why not ASN.1? Such a lovely name and the ".1" part just makes it clear that it's the number 1 option at all times
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Replying to @andrepiske @its_bvisness
Worse. Language dependant too! This is why you can’t write a PNG reader in Ruby because most PNGs are created using code compiled by C 🤪
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Replying to @andrepiske @its_bvisness
And then you learned about gRPC , aka Proto buffers
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