Remove blank arrays and false boolean variables from serialised output

[pavel-odintsov]

Hello!

First of all, I would like to say thank you for your brilliant library!

Right now I'm working on space optimisation of our data.

We have a pretty big number of false variables and blank arrays in output. I'm looking for ways to suppress them from generated message pack.

For example, we have the following structure:

type MyData struct {
  Name string
  Options []string
  SomeBoolValue bool
  AnotherBoolVariable bool
} 

And then we have the following structure:

obj.Name = "xyz"
obj.Options = []string{}
obj.SomeBoolVariable = false
obj.AnotherBoolVariable = true

And I would like to have in generated message pack only:

Name: "xyz"
obj.AnotherBoolVariable = true

And skip blank arrays / false variables.

How could I achieve this goal?

Thank you!

[philhofer]

This issue is trickier than it looks at first (see #164 - a 12,000 line change).

Another option might be to add a feature to the msgp library that lets you strip zeroed fields from a serialized message. I'll try to sketch that out if I can find some free time.

[pavel-odintsov]

@philhofer Oh, yes, I see. It's pretty sophisticated;( Good luck with these changes! Hope to see them merged to master.

I think an option to use additional tool to strip blank fields works for us. We do not care so much about serialise performance but de-serialisation performance (and space) is very important for us. So, we are happy to have additional method which cleans messages from redundant data.

[pavel-odintsov]

Do you have any progress in this direction?

[bradleypeabody]

Since this issue was originally created, omitempty and omitzero struct tags were introduced, which I believe fully addresses this concern.