FlatBuffers is an efficient cross platform serialization library for C++, C#, C, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more. It was originally created at Google for game development and other performance-critical applications. FlatBuffers allows you to directly access serialized data without parsing/unpacking it first, while still having great forwards/backwards compatibility. It provides both memory efficiency and speed by allowing direct access to the serialized data, and supports zero-copy deserialization.