Formaatbuffers

Formaatbuffers are memory buffers designed to hold data that has already been formatted according to a specific data representation. They separate data generation from formatting, enabling reuse of the same in-memory objects across multiple output formats and transport layers. A formaatbuffer typically includes a descriptor that defines the target format (for example JSON, XML, CSV, or a binary protocol), a contiguous or scatter-gather memory region, and utilities for writing, resizing, and validating the formatted data.

In practice, formatting code writes into the buffer using a formatter component that respects alignment, endianness, and escape rules. After filling, the buffer may be handed to an I/O subsystem for transmission, written to disk, or passed to a downstream formatter for another format in multi-format pipelines. This approach supports modular pipelines where data can be serialized once and reused in different formats without regenerating the underlying data structures.

Common use cases include high-performance logging and telemetry systems that emit records in multiple formats, network protocols that require prebuilt frames, and storage systems that output data in several formats for compatibility or analysis. In multimedia and data processing pipelines, formaatbuffers can store headers or metadata that accompany a payload, enabling efficient assembly of complete streams.

Advantages include reduced repeated formatting work and potential performance gains through preallocation and zero-copy paths in certain setups. Trade-offs involve additional memory usage and the need for careful lifetime and synchronization management of buffers. Related concepts are serialization, encoding, marshaling, and buffering.