XDR (External Data Representation) is a binary encoding format developed at Sun Microsystems in the 80s. It's used in a variety of systems and protocols, perhaps most notably the RPC system (Variably known as ONC RPC - where ONC stands for Open Network Computing - or Sun RPC) that underpins NFS, NIS, and some other related protocols.
XDR is specified in RFC 4506, obsoleting previous RFC 1832 and RFC 1014.
That RFC also specifies an XDR schema language. That language is not implemented here; see the companion xdrgen utility.
This package's version may be below 1.0, but the intention is to avoid any compatibility breaks in the package's interface
Performance is considered a feature; the implementation of this package includes many optimisations with the hope of avoiding the need to employ code generation in real systems.
A short excerpt of the benchmark results:
BenchmarkUnionStructsEncode/XDREncoderDiscard-8 1765423 617 ns/op
BenchmarkUnionStructsEncode/GobEncoderDiscard-8 540541 1921 ns/op
BenchmarkUnionStructsEncode/JSONEncoderDiscard-8 564619 2063 ns/op
The most heavily optimised versions require the use of the unsafe package. You
may opt out of this by using the nounsafe build tag
Released under the ISC license