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Except it quickly gets messy when you start dealing with real data and making sure encoding and escaping is done correctly. > with a binary protocol, it can be

Except it quickly gets messy when you start dealing with real data and making sure encoding and escaping is done correctly. > with a binary protocol, it can be difficult to use across different languages This is also true of text protocols that aren't well-designed. I don't think it's necessarily the case that binary protocols are more difficult to deal with. You just have a different set of concerns to address. > If you use the simplest possible encoding, you’d send raw struct data. This is the "simplest" in the sense that it's definitely easy to just copy this data on the wire, but I think this is a straw man. I don't think it's really any more difficult to write a simple protocol that uses binary data compared to text.

mbreese 5y ago
> I don't think it's really any more difficult to write a simple protocol that uses binary data compared to text. I don’t really think so either… I mean, I’ve done both and it’s really not terrible to use binary. I think text is marginally easier to parse, but once to have the routines to read the right endian-ness, the advantage is minor. As you said, the biggest concern (as always) should be the design. A good design can be implemented easily with either mode. However, it is significantly easier to debug a text protocol. Attaching a monitor or capturing packets is easier with text as the parsers are much easier and more generic.
- michaelmior 5y ago
  That's fair. Although tools like Wireshark have made this much better.