But that seems like just ignoring the problem, like an ostrich shoving one’s head into the sand! > Have you ever examined a protobuf file without knowing what

But that seems like just ignoring the problem, like an ostrich shoving one’s head into the sand! > Have you ever examined a protobuf file without knowing what the protobuf structure is? Are you referring to an ASCII serialization or a binary serialization? In a typical scenario, your application needed structured data (hence protobuf), and then you serialized your protobuf into an ASCII bytestream... so how are you ever worse off with a protobuf compared to a text file, provided you make a good choice of serialization scheme? Clearly text files cannot carry enough structure, so we have to build more layers of scaffolding on top? Ultimately files are serialized on to disk as bits, and “ASCII” and “posix” are just “plugins” to be used when reading bitstreams (serialized file objects). Plaintext is not readable if the bits get corrupted or byte boundaries/endianness gets shifted! To have the same amount of of robustness with higher-order structures I imagine all one needs is a well-defined de/serialization protocol which would allow you to load new objects into memory? Am I missing something?