[gritzko]

That resonates well with my conclusions that led to the Replicated Object Notation project. [1]. If the parser creates an AST tree or some number of dictionaries or some other bullshit... "now you have two problems", that's it.

I settled on a tabular-log format, which is streamed and immediately consumed most of the time, no intermediate object structures.

Then, that "text vs binary" distinction became mostly moot. The binary is slightly more efficient, but grossly less readable, so no big gain, unless at grand scale.

[1] http://replicated.cc