Slava @ RethinkDB here. To add to other people's comments, this is really important in the context of microservices/polyglot persistence. For example, a typica

Slava @ RethinkDB here. To add to other people's comments, this is really important in the context of microservices/polyglot persistence. For example, a typical app might be composed of Java and Node code, and an object stored from the Java application needs to be read from Node (and vice versa). The only way to do that is to have a standardized intermediate communication format, and after trying a bunch of different formats (Protocol Buffers, custom serialization methods, etc.) we settled on JSON because it has a perfect balance of portability and efficiency.