Too Long; Didn't Read
Given a collection of byte arrays, how do you pack them efficiently into a single block to use in memory, write to disk, and transmit over a network? We decided to put together a formal specification called BFAST for encoding binary arrays. BFAST is an acronym for “Binary Format for Array Serialization and Transmission’. The BFAST format consists of three sections: Fixed size descriptor (32 bytes) A pointer table that identifies where each binary buffer starts and ends within the data block. A list of Utf-8 encoded strings separated by null characters.