Bond project ending March 2025

[chwarr]

The Bond open source project will be ending development on March 31, 2025. After that date:

• There will be no further activity in this project: no new features, no bug fixes, and, importantly, no security fixes.
• The project's README will be updated to indicate that the project has been shut down.
• The Bond repositories on GitHub will remain, but they will be archived and read-only. You will still be able to access releases and source code, but you will no longer be able to open PRs or report issues.
• Bond's NuGet packages will remain on NuGet.org, but they will be unlisted and marked as unsupported.
• We will no longer monitor the StackOverflow tag “bond”.
• The bond package on Hackage will be deprecated.

If you are a Microsoft team that uses Bond, please see https://aka.ms/bond for Microsoft-internal guidance.

The most comprehensive documentation of the Bond binary formats can be found in the files compact_binary.h, fast_binary.h, and simple_binary.h.

On a personal note, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to Bond, whether you asked questions, reported bugs, or contributed to Bond itself. I learned something from every one of you, and I would not be the software developer I am today were it not for the time I worked on Bond. Special mentions go to @sapek, @ara-ayvazyan, @lalo, @tstein, @sigansky, @musiddi, and @bhardwajs.

Microsoft has no affiliation with other open-source implementations of Bond. We cannot endorse any of them, and Microsoft will not provide any support.

This announcement does not affect Microsoft products that themselves use Bond. You can receive support for those products under their individual support policies. However, these products will not provide general support for Bond.

[chadwalters]

Sad to see Microsoft stopping development of Bond. Let me know if any parties come forward with interest in continuing Bond development/support; I am considering getting involved again.

[niclar]

What's the reason for shutting this down, will development continue closed source or are you moving to another technology ?

[kalaskarsanket]

@niclar We do not have any updates to share at the moment.

[codeandroid]

That's sad news. I found Bond to be quite uniquely positioned. The ability to generate language native data structures incl. type mappings to more specialized custom language-specific types along with reflection is a very powerful tool.

At our org we have come to use it in a variety of ways (which perhaps were never in its original scope). And we rely on it in so many ways (reflection based database schemas, reflection based UI, RPC, complex internal data structures, and quite a few more specialized scenarios ... hundreds of .bond files). Nearly every developer comes into contact with it.

So, before I miss the opportunity, I'd like to post a quick and sincere thank you for Bond. Personally, I've learned quite a few things whenever I needed to scroll through the sources. It's sad to see Microsoft stopping support/development.

At $work we will definitely come up with a strategy to keep Bond alive (at least, for us).

[chadwalters]

@codeandroid I'm one of the originators of the Bond project and I am potentially interested in moving the project forward with some corporate sponsorship. Let me know if you'd like to discuss this.