[dexterlemmer]

> Having standard serialization is just gonna be boilerplate and unneccessary for many programs.

And for a lot of programs having to keep generating and parsing strings is just a bunch of unnecessary boilerplate.

> Stream of bytes is the only sane thing to do. Nothing keeps you from not having a flag in your cli programs to choose the input/output format. In fact many programs already has this and json seems pretty popular.

Having an API like this is a great idea... as a thin wrapper on top of a tool with a standardized serde protocol or binary file format. The different API's can be exposed as separate tools or as separate parts of the API of a single tool from a user's POV.

Furthermore: JSON is not just a stream of bytes nor text, neither is CSV, nor any other text format. Handling text as properly typed objects makes a lot of sense.

I have little experience with shells that can work with objects like Powershell. But I'e seen screenshots of new objects-based shell developed in Rust some time ago and it was early days still so I didn't actually even try it out, but looked downright great compared to the current stream of text-based shells of today in terms of ergonomics and capabilities.