I think if you're a little more generous and say "you rarely need" rather than "nobody really needs", there's no contradiction. Most of the time, you're not usi

I think if you're a little more generous and say "you rarely need" rather than "nobody really needs", there's no contradiction. Most of the time, you're not using much CPU in total or your server is doing something much heavier than parsing and serialization. Either way, JSON is fine. Improving its performance is nice but not worth a ton of effort. Once in a while, it's significant, and you switch to a binary format if you can. And like anything, it depends on what you're doing. If you're doing lots of server-to-server RPCs on big distributed systems like within Google, it's much more reasonable to start with protobuf or the like than with JSON. And not just for performance reasons; having the generated code helps a lot with maintainability. (Some JSON libraries have something similar; some don't.)