New comment by alex602 in "Qdf – a Go serializer you query the raw bytes of, smaller than protobuf"

alex602 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:41:23 +0000

Author here. qdf is a schemaless binary serializer for Go — encoding/json-style API, no schema/IDL/codegen. The idea is to compress across records (inline string/key interning + columnar per-column codecs), so on batch telemetry it's -24..-77% vs protobuf and both smaller and faster to DECODE than json/msgpack on the default tier.

The part I had most fun with: a columnar mode you can run WHERE-predicates over without fully decoding, and a lossy vector codec for AI embeddings that beats Google's TurboQuant at equal recall (-22% bytes).

Honest about tradeoffs — protobuf/flatbuffers win raw single-message decode, and msgpack can edge encode on high-cardinality data; it's alpha. Pure Go, zero deps. Built solo; happy to answer anything.

Qdf – a Go serializer you query the raw bytes of, smaller than protobuf

alex602 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:40:31 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/alex60217101990/qdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762352

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

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New comment by alex602 in "Qdf – a Go serializer you query the raw bytes of, smaller than protobuf"

Qdf – a Go serializer you query the raw bytes of, smaller than protobuf