[meehai]

and with little data (i.e. <10Mb), this matters much less than accessibility and easy understanding of the data using a simple text editor or jq in the terminal + some filters.

[xxs]

what do you mean by little data, most communication protocols are not one off

[creationix]

Also good luck parsing 10 MiB of JSON in a loop that can't tolerate blocking the CPU for more than 10ms.

What's expensive is very relative to the use case.