This makes no sense in lots of applications. Today computers have hardware acceleration for moving chunks of data. Big chucks of data, unpack things byte by byt

This makes no sense in lots of applications. Today computers have hardware acceleration for moving chunks of data. Big chucks of data, unpack things byte by byte makes not sense on things that have to be efficient. It is like 20.000 times more efficient to do things with blocks. If you move text around you probably don't care about efficiency and can do it. If you care about efficiency and price(using cheap components) it is a very bad solution. We use in all our serial-deserial a very fine grained controlled C library and it has been working flawlessly for years. This library is interfaced with C++, java, objC, swift,clojure, rust...