Why would you want your log files purely as text? It tends to take up a lot more space when you're storing a useful amount of readable information. Category pr

Why would you want your log files purely as text? It tends to take up a lot more space when you're storing a useful amount of readable information. Category prefixes and time stamps alone take up enough space that you could benefit from having them stored concisely. Indentation actually takes up space. The lines are delimited, not counted (you can have a trailing count). And so on. Space will always be a bottleneck, and generating the data will always take time; no reason to make that worse. The average log byte will be written once and then never looked at by a human. Producing ASCII text also requires a lot more code. Entire articles have been written on the correct way to print a float as decimal digits... or, you could memcpy 4 bytes into a buffer, while knowing ahead of time exactly how much space you'll need (and the value will round trip perfectly). Something similar goes for integers (using something like LEB128 encoding). In both cases the encoded data will likely take up less space than most useful text representations, even taking into account any control bytes, while being a lot quicker to produce. "But what if there's a bug?"... well, you'll probably find it in one of your first tests, when you write the first thing that sprang to mind. There's not much space for bugs to sneak in. People don't like this because we have crappy tools. If `cat' supported this kind of encoding as-is, nobody would complain about the idea. You can tell by the popularity of gzip... who complains about gzip? But good luck trying to read a gzip file without the right tools.