"BitTorrent became popular around year 2005, whereas JSON became popular around year 2010. The usage of JSON in the real world has greatly eclipsed BitTorrent o

"BitTorrent became popular around year 2005, whereas JSON became popular around year 2010. The usage of JSON in the real world has greatly eclipsed BitTorrent or bencode, so there is a natural bias to view bencode through the lens of JSON even though JSON was adopted later (though not necessarily invented later)." Netstrings was proposed in 1997. https://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt https://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt Whether bencoding's remarkable similarity to netstrings is purely coincidence is left as a question for the reader. Perhaps there is a "natural bias" to view netstrings through the lens of bencoding even though bencoding came much later. "Oddly enough, BitTorrent's bencode format is a significant subset of JSON but is much easier to parse as a binary format." Curious what makes it "odd". JSON assumed that memory is an unlimited resource.^1 It is like having to read an entire file into memory before processing it. Hence we see revisions such as "line-delimited JSON". Netstrings is even more memory-efficient than line-oriented processing; there is no need to read in an entire line. 1. This makes sense if one agrees that JSON was designed for graphical web browsers, programs notorious for excessive memory usage.