Tape's values determine design decisions. The values are in this particular order:
- Provide a type-safe encoding of all possible Dart objects: Developers should be able to use tape for all their serilaization needs that might come up in Dart.
- Usability / great developer experience: There should be rock-solid tooling for helping developers get up-to-speed. This also includes extensive documentation of the underlying layers, example use-cases etc.
- Encoding speed: The encoding should be relatively fast to allow using tape in more scenarios where speed is important.
- Encoding size: Encoding size is explicitly listed after the other values. Smaller encodings are nice, but if encoding size really matters, users should apply general-purpose compression like zip to the output anyway. Especially, long ranges of consecutive zeroes or 255s are no problem, because they are easy to compress.