[Xorlev]

It's just a saying. All we do is move protos from one service to another.

JSON is definitely not the right stuff.

[dmoy]

The encoding/decoding cost is painful :(

I mean in this context if you're doing that level of scale. For a lot of purposes json is totally fine.

[isatty]

It's really not - compared to the wire cost/static type checks and loads of other stuff you give up.