Please don't do this. It may sound reasonable at first but 'simple structures' don't define strings, variable length ints nor any kind of list type. Eventually

Please don't do this. It may sound reasonable at first but 'simple structures' don't define strings, variable length ints nor any kind of list type. Eventually you'll need some of that and your protocol will become a mess of implicit padding and implicit stride rules, where every list is handled in a different way. Not to mention all the deserialization security holes you are going to have. If you don't believe me take a look at X11.