cognitect/transit-format

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1918 stars · 37 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Transit is a data interchange format and set of libraries for conveying typed values between applications written in different programming languages, built on top of JSON and MessagePack. It uses a tag-based extension mechanism so values like dates and URIs can be represented without schemas, while remaining self-describing and compressible via caching of repeated elements.

Use cases

• send typed values between services in different languages
• serialize dates and URIs over JSON without losing type info
• reduce payload size by caching repeated map keys
• stream values between programs without a top-level envelope
• exchange data between Clojure and JavaScript applications
• decode and inspect messages from apps using unknown extension tags

When to choose

• you need typed, self-describing data interchange across languages
• you want JSON or MessagePack compatibility with richer semantic types
• you need streaming-friendly encoding without schemas
• you work in the Clojure ecosystem where Transit is well supported

When to avoid

• human readability of payloads is a priority
• you need schema validation or a formal type system
• you need object identity or reference semantics in serialized data
• your consumers only support plain JSON with no Transit-aware readers

Facets

library · maturity stable

serialization developer-tools apis microservices cross-platform jvm python data-interchange-format messagepack typed-values specification clojure javascript

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cognitect/transit-format")