I can't believe that people have communally forgotten how easy binary protocols are. You don't need protobuf, you don't need json, you don't need any of these

I can't believe that people have communally forgotten how easy binary protocols are. You don't need protobuf, you don't need json, you don't need any of these things that just add bloat and cost you performance. Writing and reading binary is easy, and is FAR easier than JSON if you are using something like C. Most languages have convenience methods for strings, yes, and those can be stacked on top of each other so that JSON libraries can be written, of course. Those libraries are FAR slower than just reading and writing bytes, and deserializing those bytes into structs or serializing those structs into a byte array, and the binary data is much smaller than a JSON document containing the same data would be. People these days are acting like binary protocols are hard, or that they are suboptimal for one reason or another. I guarantee you that someone who was trying to find a bug in a JSON library will spend as much time or more than someone trying to find a similar bug in a method that reads or writes binary data, and at the end of it, the person who looked at the methods that handle binary data will FULLY understand what is happening in that code. The person debugging the JSON library will almost certainly not have a full understanding of the JSON library after finding and fixing a bug unless they wrote it to begin with. It comes down to this - all computer programs do is process data. All UX problems, all usability problems, all computer problems boil down to problems transforming data. Transforming data is literally the only thing a computer can do. Any work spent writing code that does not directly solve the data transformation problem at hand is wasted time and work on the part of the developer. Any performance lost using code that does not directly solve the data transformation problem at hand is time away from the CPU for other tasks, time away from a consumer of that data, and so on. It adds up, and it adds up quickly.