[naikrovek]

> During this process, I benchmarked a number of different binary encodings. To my surprise, I found that all of them were much slower than JSON in browsers.

I doubt this a lot. Even turning a small JSON message into a pre-defined character-delimited string is at least an order of magnitude faster than JSON. In my testing, at least. in my testing over the years, JSON has always been the slowest thing to extract information out of, no matter how you approach it. And any binary format will be faster than just about any text format.

developers think binary stuff is scary, or somehow harder than text, but it isn't. binary is faster, smaller, and depending on your use case, more flexible.

I use type-length-value for just about everything binary. it's easy to understand later with a hex editor if you need to, but obviously documentation helps understanding this greatly. and no documentation for these format is the code which reads it.

binary formats. good. try it. tell your friends.