[nly]

A lot of protocols in low latency trading systems just have fixed maximum size strings and will right pad with NUL or ASCII space characters.

Packed structs with fixed size fields, little endian integers and fixed point is heaven to work with.

[hot_gril]

I can see that in niche situations, particularly if you have a flat structure and uniform hardware. Cap'n Proto is also a way to do zero-parsing, but it has other costs.