[khold_stare]

Author of the article here - I completely agree. This text parsing problem came up because I was lamenting how many cycles were wasted in text processing. At my current job a text-based protocol from a 3rd party means around 80% of CPU time for the entire application is spent parsing and rendering text just for the protocol. JSON and HTTP come to mind too.

The human readability argument doesn't really hold any water because if you have a structured description of a protocol (e.g. a C struct), you can always write simple tools to inspect the protocol and make it just as humanly readable as JSON is. This is even easier if a language has reflection to generate all this code.

[imtringued]

What prevents you from using CBOR? I do understand that a fixed schema is more of a shackle and can't be used in every situation but CBOR doesn't require an external schema.