[DougBTX]

> either your binary format ends up not much better than JSON or you end up reencoding old comments because the API changed

Those are other options too, eg, storing the schema separately from the records (then batching records with identical schemas in compact binary files) and defining migration rules between different schemas (eg, if schema A has required field "foo" while schema B has required field "foo" and optional field "bar" then data which follows schema A can be trivially migrated to schema B at read time without needing to reencode on disk).

https://avro.apache.org/docs/current/