[wahern]

In the 80s there was RPC/XDR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_RPC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Data_Representation), which was used pretty heavily in the Unix world. On most Unix systems today, including Linux and macOS, you'll find this suite installed. Try `man rpc` and `man xdr`. XDR is what protocols like NFS are based upon.

A contemporaneous competitor to Sun RPC was DCE/RPC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE/RPC), which I think Microsoft's SMB protocol was based upon, albeit in Microsoft's trademark manner--embrace, extend, extinguish.

None of these require compilers, but you're usually better off for them, especially for serialization and deserialization, regardless of whether you're using a specialized library. On Unix there are libraries that can be used in an ad hoc fashion for RPC/XDR, but also rpcgen (`man rpcgen`).