[random478101]

As far I can see "IO" addresses the size issue, which is indeed a compression issue for the most part.

For a broader take on an alternative, there is concise encoding Concise Encoding [1][2], which I believe addresses a few more issues with existing encodings (clear spec, schema not an afterthought, native support for a variety of data structures, security, ...).

[1] https://concise-encoding.org/ [2] The author gave a presentation on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dIHq4GJE14

[wffurr]

People keep saying “just use gzip and JSON is plenty small” but gzip isn’t free. It takes time and power to do all the compression and decompression. The uncompressed size of the data takes up memory on client and server.

A smaller data format requires less compression time and power and you can fit more of it in memory at either end.

[petre]

There's Messagepack and CBOR and Flat Buffers. All of them are faster and smaller than any text based format.