Any idea why they picked XDR rather than something that is more widely used in the present day, like Thrift? That is efficient on the wire, and pretty widely supported:
they wanted something standard and I guess did not realize that the IETF standard for XDR is not that widely used. I agree it would have been nicer if they went for something like thrift instead. However, it's done and I don't think they can fix this without breaking compatibility.
I do wonder why XDR sort of failed to get used and why people went ahead and created protocol bufs and thrift as alternatives.
I do wonder why XDR sort of failed to get used and why people went ahead and created protocol bufs and thrift as alternatives.