I think Redis would have been successful even without a text-heavy protocol. Redis took a middle ground and [ascii]-length prefixed responses (though I don't t

I think Redis would have been successful even without a text-heavy protocol. Redis took a middle ground and [ascii]-length prefixed responses (though I don't think it was initially like this). That's a reasonable and likely necessary compromise. A bit similar to how HTTP can include a content-length. You'd hate to be scanning large payloads for that trailing \r\n. So Redis terminates with \r\n (which isn't strictly necessary for all message types) and ascii encodes the types and length prefix. Everything else is just bytes. Here's (1) a paper that looked at text vs binary protocols. They looked at it in the context of MonetDB though, which has, by far, the worse text-based protocol I've ever seen (so much so that even their official drivers have (had?) plenty of protocol-related bugs) (1) - https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2018/papers/14-networking/p1022-muehleisen.pdf https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2018/papers/14-networ...