My ideal binary format would contain exactly the types supported by json + binary - arbitrary size numbers. It would be something like this, maybe: - 'n' - nul

My ideal binary format would contain exactly the types supported by json + binary - arbitrary size numbers. It would be something like this, maybe: - 'n' - null - 'f' - false - 't' - true - 'i' - int (64 bit, little endian, two's complement) - 'd' - double (64 bit, ieee-754) - 'a' - array start - 'o' - object start (must contain even number of values) - 'e' - array/object end - 's' - utf-8 string chunk (64 bytes, must be followed by string chunk or string) - 'b' - binary chunk (64 bytes, must be followed by binary chunk or binary) - 0x80-0xbf - utf-8 string (0-63 bytes) - 0xc0-0xff - binary (0-63 bytes) It is at least an order of magnitude simpler to implement than almost all of its contenders. It is just not as concise and doesn't support a rich set of data types (but then again, json does quite well without a timestamp type). It supports streaming. It has a unique representation for every value (if you ignore that ieee-754 can represent many integers and objects have no defined ordering). Reading a single byte can tell you in every case the type and the amount of payload data that follows.