µON [muon]

A compact and simple object notation. µ[mju:] stands for "micro".

File extension:     .mu
MIME type:          application/muon
Endianness:         little-endian
Signature/Magic:    optional, 8F B5 30 31 ["�µ01"] @ 0x0

Muon has some interesting properties (see presentation and docs):

• Every null-terminated UTF8 string is at the same time a valid muon object
• Gaps in the UTF8 encoding space (code units) are used to encode things like [ ] { } etc.
• Muon is self-describing and schemaless, just like JSON (unlike Protobuf and FlatBuffers)
• Compact (~10..50% smaller than JSON). On par or outperforms CBOR, MsgPack, UBJSON
• Unlimited size of objects and values
• Data is ready to be used in-place without pre-processing
• Supports raw binary data (values and TypedArrays)
• Can optionally contain count of elements (and size in bytes) of all structures for efficient document processing, similar to BSON

Future goals:

• Strict specification (little or no room for implementation-specific behavior / vendor-specific extensions)

Try it yourself

python3 muon_py/json2mu.py ./data/AirlineDelays.min.json ./AirlineDelays.mu
python3 muon_py/mu2json.py ./AirlineDelays.mu > ./AirlineDelays.json

Run benchmarks:

python3 muon_py/extra/json-analyze.py ./data/*.json ./data/small/*.json
python3 muon_py/mu-benchmark.py ./data/*.json ./data/small/*.json

Muon structure

See more in documentation.

Disclaimer: the notation is still Work In Progress. If you have any ideas or comments, please feel free to post them here.