Re the first note in the post: a good serialization format is both easy to read by machine and read/write by human. I think the text protobuf file is one of suc

Re the first note in the post: a good serialization format is both easy to read by machine and read/write by human. I think the text protobuf file is one of such example. A (human read/write-able) config language needs to be consumed by program anyway, in a sense a config language is a human-to-computer serialization format.