Yeah, this is kinda the cost of not having an encode/decode step. The Haskell implementation (of which I am the primary author) provides a higher-level API with

Yeah, this is kinda the cost of not having an encode/decode step. The Haskell implementation (of which I am the primary author) provides a higher-level API with "normal" data types for cases where performance requirements aren't stringent enough to merit the extra burden on the developer. I'm mostly interested in RPC, so I rarely use the low-level API myself...