Comment by leeoniya
10 months ago
> JSON BinPack is space-efficient, but what about runtime-efficiency?
> When transmitting data over the Internet, time is the bottleneck, making computation essentially free in comparison.
i thought this was an odd sales pitch from the jsonbinpack site, given that a central use-case is IoT, which frequently runs on batteries or power-constrained environments where there's no such thing as "essentially free"
Fair point! "Embedded" and "IoT" are overloaded terms. For example, you find "IoT" devices all the way from extremely low powered micro-controllers to Linux-based ones with plenty of power and they are all considered "embedded". I'll take notes to improve the wording.
That said, the production-ready implementation of JSON BinPack is designed to run on low powered devices and still provide those same benefits.
A lot of the current work is happening at https://github.com/sourcemeta/jsontoolkit, a dependency of JSON BinPack that implements a state-of-the-art JSON Schema compiler (I'm a TSC member of JSON Schema btw) to do fast and efficient schema evaluation within JSON BinPack on low powered devices compared to the current prototype (which requires schema evaluation for resolving logical schema operators). Just an example of the complex runtime-efficiency tracks we are pursuing.
> batteries or power-constrained environments
I would imagine that CPUs are much more efficient than a satellite transmitter, probably? I guess you'd have to balance the additional computational energy required vs. the savings in energy from less transmitting.
Yeah, it all depends very much, given how huge the "embedded/IoT" spectrum is. Each use case has its own unique constraints, which makes it very hard to give general advice.
For sure, but radio transmitter time is almost always much more expensive than CPU time! It’s 4mA-20mA vs 180mA on an esp32; having the radio on is a 160mA load! As long as every seven milliseconds compressing saves a millisecond of transmission, your compression algorithm comes out ahead.
Sounds like you are pretty familiar with satellite transmission at the hardware level. If so, I would love to chat to get your brains on it. I don't know much of the hardware constraints myself.
You can; I worked mostly with WiMAX instead of direct satellite but the radio transmission is the killer either way.
> on an esp32;
ironically the main criticism i've heard of these is how power-inefficient they are :P