Identifiers are textual also (though shorter). You don't have arbitrary byte strings as identifiers. And yes, if you build RPC specifically, then you have to be

Identifiers are textual also (though shorter). You don't have arbitrary byte strings as identifiers. And yes, if you build RPC specifically, then you have to be ready to the fact that you will have to deal with symbolic identifiers. You can work around that by transcoding them somehow into an efficient format - like protobuf does by forcing the schema to provide translation, or by additional communication as you mentioned, but it's unavoidable that the symbolic identifiers will pop up somewhere and they will be human-readable and thus redundant. > I am bit puzzled if this saving really makes meaningful difference?! They make somewhat misleading claim - "37.5% space efficient against UTF-8" - but that doesn't tell us how much gain it is on a typical protocol interaction, It could be 37.5% improvement on 0.1% of all data or on 50% of all data - depending on that, the overall effect could vary drastically. I guess if they are doing it, it makes some sense for them, but it's hard to figure out how much it saves in the big picture.