FlatBuffers ===========

FlatBuffers is a cross platform serialization library architected for maximum memory efficiency. It allows you to directly access serialized data without parsing/unpacking it first, while still having great forwards/backwards compatibility.

Quick Start

• Build the compiler for flatbuffers (flatc)

Use cmake to create the build files for your platform and then perform the compilation (Linux example).

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles"
    make -j

• Define your flatbuffer schema (.fbs)

Write the schema to define the data you want to serialize. See monster.fbs for an example.

• Generate code for your language(s)

Use the flatc compiler to take your schema and generate language-specific code:

./flatc --cpp --rust monster.fbs

Which generates monstergenerated.h and monstergenerated.rs files.

• Serialize data

Use the generated code, as well as the FlatBufferBuilder to construct your serialized buffer. (C++ example)

• Transmit/store/save Buffer

Use your serialized buffer however you want. Send it to someone, save it for later, etc...

• Read the data

Use the generated accessors to read the data from the serialized buffer.

It doesn't need to be the same language/schema version, FlatBuffers ensures the data is readable across languages and schema versions. See the Rust example reading the data written by C++.

Documentation

Go to our [landing page][] to browse our documentation.

Supported operating systems

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux
• Android
• And any others with a recent C++ compiler (C++ 11 and newer)

Supported programming languages

Code generation and runtime libraries for many popular languages.

• C
• C++ - snapcraft.io
• C# - nuget.org
• Dart - pub.dev
• Go - go.dev
• Java - Maven
• JavaScript - NPM
• Kotlin
• Lobster
• Lua
• PHP
• Python - PyPI
• Rust - crates.io
• Swift - swiftpackageindex
• TypeScript - NPM
• Nim

Versioning

FlatBuffers does not follow traditional SemVer versioning (see rationale) but rather uses a format of the date of the release.

Contribution

• [FlatBuffers Issues Tracker][] to submit an issue.
• [stackoverflow.com][] with [flatbuffers tag][] for any questions regarding FlatBuffers.

To contribute to this project, see [CONTRIBUTING][].

Community

• Discord Server

Security

Please see our Security Policy for reporting vulnerabilities.

Licensing

Flatbuffers is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See [LICENSE][] for the full license text.

[CONTRIBUTING]: http://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md [flatbuffers tag]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/flatbuffers [FlatBuffers Google Group]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/flatbuffers [FlatBuffers Issues Tracker]: http://github.com/google/flatbuffers/issues [stackoverflow.com]: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=flatbuffers [landing page]: https://google.github.io/flatbuffers [LICENSE]: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/LICENSE