Confused about how to use Flatbuffers with Julia

[edward-bestx]

I have read the documentation. It isn't very long (about 1 page).

Having read it, I am none the wiser about how to use flatbuffers with a Julia project.

Is Flatbuffers actually supported by Julia? Other issues raised which are still open seem to imply that it is not. However this doesn't seem to make much sense, otherwise why would there be a FlatBuffers.jl package, and why would this documentation exist at all?

Putting the above confusion aside, typically with FlatBuffers (or Protobuf) one creates a file which specifies the message format, before compiling it with flatc (or protoc).

flatc does not support Julia as an output.

So - how does one actually use a FlatBuffer message specification file with Julia?

For example: The following is a copy of monster.fbs from the flatbuffers documentation.

table Monster {
  name:string;
  health:int;
}

root_type Monster;

If I create this monster.fbs file, can I use that with Julia? If so, how?

[edward-bestx]

I managed to figure out one possible way of reading and writing flatbuffers with this Julia package, but it does not make use of the usual flatbuffer specification file, which is then compiled using flatc.

Here is an example:

using FlatBuffers

@with_kw mutable struct Example
    some_data::String
end

example = Example(; some_data="hello world")

f = open("example.flatbuf", "w")
FlatBuffers.serialize(f, example)
close(f)

f = open("example.flatbuf", "r")
example_2 = FlatBuffers.deserialize(f, Example)
close(f)

This is done entirely from within Julia. I would have expected to write some kind of file which contains a flatbuffer spec, and then compile this using flatc into a *.jl file, which can be include'd or import'd from another Julia module.

[Cvikli]

Yeah, that would be nice by the way. I would love to include that file too and use it transparently.
Can we have that feature? :D