> requiring specialized tooling that may also have its own bugs The common ones all have Wireshark plugins. So I'm not sure what's special. > They can also su

> requiring specialized tooling that may also have its own bugs The common ones all have Wireshark plugins. So I'm not sure what's special. > They can also suffer from things like insufficiently specified byte ordering issues and differences in floating point behaviour between systems ... I know of at least one game that very close but not quite cross compatible between Windows and Linux... I think this shows I did a poor job of explaining myself. I don't mean that everyone should create their own binary encoding. I'm saying that you should pick a well-known, well-supported encoding like protobufs, Avro, CBOR, flatbuffers ... There are about a dozen strong contenders, all of which have tooling, library support and the ability to ROFLstomp plaintext on any measure of burden other than yours or mine.