[Thorrez]

dmi knows that. dmi was saying that even if the encoding scheme allows encoding simpler types, it's often not smart to use that functionality, because you won't be able to evolve the format in the future. If you encode a message instead of a simple type, you'll be able to evolve it later as you add more features to your program.

Note that even protobufs, which doesn't allow encoding simple types at the top level, still has this debate when deciding whether to encode an array of simple types (inside a struct) or an array of structs (inside a struct). And Google's guidance is to use an array of structs if more data might be needed in the future:

>However, if additional data is likely to be needed in the future, repeated fields should use a message instead of a scalar proactively, to avoid parallel repeated fields.

https://google.aip.dev/144

>// Good: A separate message that can grow to include more fields

https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/api/#order-independe...