[zadikian]

I guess to not have to set up protobuf or asn1. Those preconditions of both platforms using the same padding and endianness aren't that hard to satisfy if you own it all.

But do you really have such a complex struct where everything inside is fixed-size? I wouldn't be surprised if it happens, but this isn't so general-purpose like the article suggests.

[lionkor]

There are at least 10 steps between protobuf and casting a struct to a char*.