See RFC 8949 - “Concise Binary Object Representation”.

This package is a fast implementation for Common Lisp (I only tested it on SBCL).

For now the only exported functions are encode and decode.

(cbor:encode value) => sequence-of-bytes
(cbor:decode sequence-of-bytes) => value

Where sequence-of-bytes is of type (simple-array (unsigned-byte 8) 1).

You can throw pretty much any Lisp value at encode (except circular data) and it should do what you'd reasonably expect. Some dynamic variables control what happens in the usual CL ambiguities:

• *jsown-semantics* — bind this to T if you want the encoder/decoder to work similarly to JSOWN (which is the fastest JSON parser for CL that I tried). Currently, that means maps will decode to (:OBJ . alist), and the encoder will encode a similar object to a map. Arrays will always be parsed as lists, thus the empty array will decode to NIL; conversely, NIL will be encoded as empty array. If you bind this variable to T, you probably also want to bind *symbol-to-string* and *string-to-symbol* to NIL (see below).

• *array-format* (default :array) — bind this to :list if you prefer the array decoder to create lists instead of arrays.

• *symbol-to-string* is called by the encoder when a symbol is encountered. The default implementation lowercases the name and replaces dashes with underscores. If you pass NIL, symbol-name will be called instead.

• *string-to-symbol* is called by the decoder when reading map keys. The default is the reverse of *symbol-to-string*, and interns the name into the package designated by *symbols-package* (defaults to KEYWORD package). If bound to NIL, map keys will remain as they are.

• *symbols-package* — see above.

• *dictionary-format* (default :hash). Bind this to :alist if you prefer the decoder for maps to create alists, or to :plist if you prefer plists. If hash tables are preferred, they are created with :test #'EQ if *string-to-symbol* is non-NIL, or :test #'EQUAL otherwise. Note that *jsown-semantics* takes precedence over this, so if that is T then maps will be decoded as (:OBJ . alist).

Sequences of type (vector (unsigned-byte 8)) will be encoded as binary — “byte string” (major type 2).

Besides the major types, we support timestamps and bignums. As LOCAL-TIME is the de-facto time manipulation library for CL, we encode a LOCAL-TIME:TIMESTAMP object using the extended tag 1 and double-float representation (precision should be at millisecond-level). Conversely, the decoder will create LOCAL-TIME:TIMESTAMP objects when it encounters a datetime value. The decoder also supports extended tag 0 (datetime as string), but disclaimer: I didn't test that.

Bignums (extended tags 3 and 4) should work as you'd expect.

Objects and structures are encoded as maps.

Eval playground.lisp (SBCL-specific) if you want some quick test functions. (test-decode value) will encode and then decode and return the value, and it'll print the binary. (test-json "/path/to/file.json") will decode a JSON file using YASON/JSOWN, CBOR-encode/decode it with our library, and print some timing/consing information. (note that it'll dump some files into the same directory, with binaries produced for each test).

CBOR stands pretty good. Note that in timing the JSON libraries, I have included the time spent on bytes<->text UTF8 conversion. I think that's fair; that step does happen at some level, even though a high-level JSON library is normally not concerned with it. But even if you discount that time, CBOR is still faster.

MIT