Clearly there are needs for very efficient message parsing. That's why these serialization frameworks exist. I've got servers that spend too many cycles in se

Clearly there are needs for very efficient message parsing. That's why these serialization frameworks exist. I've got servers that spend too many cycles in serialization, so I pay careful attention to it. I put a lot of effort into using JSON despite the performance problems, and have pretty low-level code to read write it without too many allocations etc. Nothing thats easy on the eyes. But I'd hazard a guess that you're spot on regards the normal needs of normal programs. The vast majority of programs utilizing message-passing are not serialization-bound. For these programs I'd recommend JSON because it is easy for humans to inspect and debug, and there are plenty of libraries to choose from if you are not performance-sensitive. (YAML is hopeless regards security and XML is just horrid to look at when you're debugging).