Formats and Serialization

Data Formats and Serialization
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Filecoin seeks to make use of as few data formats as needed, with well-specced serialization rules to better protocol security through simplicity and enable interoperability amongst implementations of the Filecoin protocol.

Read more on design considerations here for CBOR-usage and here for int types in Filecoin.

Data Formats
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Filecoin in-memory data types are mostly straightforward. Implementations should support two integer types: Int (meaning native 64-bit integer), and BigInt (meaning arbitrary length) and avoid dealing with floating-point numbers to minimize interoperability issues across programming languages and implementations.

You can also read more on data formats as part of randomness generation in the Filecoin protocol.

Serialization
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  • section-systems.filecoin_files.serialization.serialization

Data Serialization in Filecoin ensures a consistent format for serializing in-memory data for transfer in-flight and in-storage. Serialization is critical to protocol security and interoperability across implementations of the Filecoin protocol, enabling consistent state updates across Filecoin nodes.

All data structures in Filecoin are CBOR-tuple encoded. That is, any data structures used in the Filecoin system (structs in this spec) should be serialized as CBOR-arrays with items corresponding to the data structure fields in their order of declaration.

You can find the encoding structure for major data types in CBOR here.

For illustration, an in-memory map would be represented as a CBOR-array of the keys and values listed in some pre-determined order. A near-term update to the serialization format will involve tagging fields appropriately to ensure appropriate serialization/deserialization as the protocol evolves.