POLO encoding

POLO Encoding and Object Serialization Scheme is a custom binary encoding for all data used in MOI. POLO stands for Prefix Ordered Lookup Offsets. The key features of POLO are deterministic serialization (even of inherently non-deterministic data structures like maps), minimal wire sizes and serialization safety. POLO follows a very strict specification that is optimized for partial decoding and differential messaging.

While POLO is internal to MOI working and not explicitly needed for Coco development, Coco provides functions for serialization (polorize) and deserialization (depolorize) as well as Cocolab provides commands to encode or decode POLO. POLO is also one of the supported formats for manifests (besides human-readable YAML and JSON).