[oandrew]

So basically it's Amazon's version of Apache Avro. Avro supports binary/json serialization, schema evolution , logical types (e.g. timestamp) and other cool stuff.

https://avro.apache.org/docs/current/spec.html

[joshka]

Avro didn't exist when Ion started development.

[fnord77]

I wanted to see what the differences are between Ion and Avro.

Unlike avro, ion doesn't require a schema.

[whimsicalism]

... or thrift ... or protobuf

https://xkcd.com/927/