This is a standalone BSON ("binary JSON") library for C++. (See bsonspec.org for more information on the BSON format.)

The library is at this time a bit early stage, but if you find it useful, that's great.

• The code herein originates as a fork from the MongoDB C++ driver. Anything that isn't simply bson was then eliminated to get a standalone bson implementation. Some things were removed just for simplicity. Other changes have been made along the way too.

• The namespace for the module is _bson. The underscore is present as it is anticipated that one day there will be an official bson driver perhaps, and we don't want to collide with that name-wise.

• In current form the code uses a touch of C++11. The main reason for this is simply to have absolutely no outside dependencies; for example in C++11 we have unique_ptr in the standard library, and that is used herein. The C++11 specific code is minimal it would be quite easy to make the library work with older C++ editions.

• Endian-awareness has been added, is preliminary, needs testing.

• The _bson::bsonobj class here behaves differently than the driver's mongo::BSONObj. The MongoDB driver version has a build in smart pointer implementation. That was removed here; bsonobj herein is simply a "view" on a bson data buffer in memory, and bsonobj itself does no memory management of it. The notion is that this is simpler and you can easily wrap them as needed yourself.

• To avoid confusion as to what implementation is being used, the classes herein use lowercase names, unlike the MongoDB C++ driver library. If you see things in uppercase, they should probably be downcased for consistency eventually...

Apache 2.0.

As mentioned above, the library uses std::unique_ptr among other things. Thus, use -std=c++0x on the compiler command line. (If that doesn't work for your project, I'd recommend using the BSON implementation in the MongoDB C++ driver instead.)

For Windows, see build/example1/example1.vcxproj for an example of settings that work. (Tested on Visual Studio 2013.)

• [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/bson]

The bsontools command line utilities project which uses this library. Likely useful for any BSON user regardless of language.