[friend-monoid]

I’ve written hundreds of parsers at this point, for many kinds of protocols - http, mqtt, canbus, midi, various strange binary stuff, cli’s, just lots and lots of parsing. I’ve found that text protocols are usually easier to parse, depending on the situation. Some binary protocols are easy because you can just cast the read buffer to a struct, but even that can fail when doing a partial read (which is the norm more then the exception in embedded spaces). And even in the best of cases you usually need to do a lot of post-processing to make sure that the data you read is correct. In the worst of cases you’re bitshifting and you have conditionals everywhere and you’re just not going to have a fun time. Canbus and midi are a lot easier to write parsers for then e.g. protobuf and mqtt. For text, stuff like http, redis, and those types of protocols are easy, but the text parsing world has json, which is the absolute worst of pains.