The official implementation is available in a variety of languages, some official libraries and others community created, such as C, C++, C#, D, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript (NodeJS), Lua, OCaml, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Smalltalk, and Swift.

[1] Data structures processed by MessagePack loosely correspond to those used in JSON format.

They consist of the following element types: MessagePack is more compact than JSON, but imposes limitations on array and integer sizes.

MessagePack on the other hand represents both maps and arrays as arrays, where each map key-value pair is contiguous, making odd items keys and even items values.

Protocol Buffers compiler creates boilerplate code in the target language to facilitate integration of serialization into the application code; MessagePack returns only a dynamically typed data structure and provides no automatic structure checks.