Yeah, protocol buffers are a bit heavyweight, a bit harder to read than a language feature could be, and add an extra dependency. That's why I don't necessaril

Yeah, protocol buffers are a bit heavyweight, a bit harder to read than a language feature could be, and add an extra dependency. That's why I don't necessarily disagree, though the reason I asked is it occurred to me that any time I have personally needed to deal with byte ordering has been code that can easily justify a heavyweight solution (unlike regex's which end up in tiny scripts that may only be run once) and they have also all been places where being able to easily interact with with the same data in other languages would have been super useful, as would being able to easily add to the format without a versioning headache. ... of course, now that I write that I realize a language feature could actually provide all of that, too.