FlatBuffers Version 1.1.0

Welcome to FlatBuffers!

Build Status

• Travis:

FlatBuffers is a serialization library for games and other memory constrained apps. Go to our landing page to browse our documentation.

FlatBuffers allows you to directly access serialized data without unpacking/parsing it first, while still having great forwards/backwards compatibility. FlatBuffers can be built for many different systems (Android, Windows, OS X, Linux), see docs/html/index.html

Discuss FlatBuffers with other developers and users on the FlatBuffers Google Group. File issues on the FlatBuffers Issues Tracker or post your questions to stackoverflow.com with a mention of flatbuffers.

For applications on Google Play that integrate this tool, usage is tracked. This tracking is done automatically using the embedded version string (flatbuffer_version_string), and helps us continue to optimize it. Aside from consuming a few extra bytes in your application binary, it shouldn’t affect your application at all. We use this information to let us know if FlatBuffers is useful and if we should continue to invest in it. Since this is open source, you are free to remove the version string but we would appreciate if you would leave it in.

Contributing

Want to contribute? Great! First, read this page (including the small print at the end).

Before you contribute

Before we can use your code, you must sign the Google Individual Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which you can do online. The CLA is necessary mainly because you own the copyright to your changes, even after your contribution becomes part of our codebase, so we need your permission to use and distribute your code. We also need to be sure of various other things—for instance that you’ll tell us if you know that your code infringes on other people’s patents. You don’t have to sign the CLA until after you’ve submitted your code for review and a member has approved it, but you must do it before we can put your code into our codebase. Before you start working on a larger contribution, you should get in touch with us first through the issue tracker with your idea so that we can help out and possibly guide you. Coordinating up front makes it much easier to avoid frustration later on.

Code reviews

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use Github pull requests for this purpose.

Some tips for good pull requests:

• Use our code style guide. When in doubt, try to stay true to the existing code of the project.
• Write a descriptive commit message. What problem are you solving and what are the consequences? Where and what did you test? Some good tips: here and here.
• If your PR consists of multiple commits which are successive improvements / fixes to your first commit, consider squashing them into a single commit (git rebase -i) such that your PR is a single commit on top of the current HEAD. This make reviewing the code so much easier, and our history more readable.

The small print

Contributions made by corporations are covered by a different agreement than the one above, the Software Grant and Corporate Contributor License Agreement.