ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

FlatBuffers

Okay kiddo, let's imagine you have a lot of toys and you want to send them to your friend who lives very far away. You can put all your toys in a box and send it to your friend, right? But there are many different types of toys, some are big, some are small, some are made of plastic, some are made of wood, and so on. To make sure your friend can play with all the toys you sent without any trouble, you need to tell them which toy is which and how to use it, right?

Now imagine this box of toys is actually a computer program and your friend is a computer system running a program. Flatbuffers help you send this program efficiently across the internet so that your friend can use it without any trouble.

Flatbuffers are like a box with many different types of toys. Just like how you need to tell your friend which toy is which, flatbuffers also need to tell the computer system which data is which. Flatbuffers organize this data in a very efficient way so that the computer system can understand it quickly and easily.

This is especially useful when you want to send programs and data across the internet to other computer systems that are far away. Flatbuffers help reduce the amount of time and resources needed to send this data.