Q: Why didn't you write this in $NEW_LANGUAGE instead of crufty C++? A: I probably should have! $NEW_LANGUAGE is deservedly attracting a lot of attention for its combination of safety, readable syntax, and support for modern programming paradigms. I've been trying out $NEW_LANGUAGE and want to write more code in it. But for this I chose C++ because it's supported on all platforms, lots of people know how to use it, and it still supports high-level abstractions (unlike C.)

Lol

What's the difference between this and CBOR?

Q: Why the name "Fleece"?

A: It's a reference to the mythical Golden Fleece, the treasure sought by Jason [emphasis mine] and the Argonauts.

I see what you did there...

Interesting. A year ago I was looking for something exactly like this for distributing data between multiple servers. Everything required a ton of overhead or was too big to use. I ended up just using json. I did discover that Brotli can compress 3 gigs of json down into just 70 megs nearly instantly.

This post leads me to piggyback and see what people think of lambdabuffers (which are not my work but something I became aware of through the Haskell community).