"embedded" is a big market and isn't always constrained to be hard-realtime. I spent years as an "embedded" developer at chumby industries and ended up having

"embedded" is a big market and isn't always constrained to be hard-realtime. I spent years as an "embedded" developer at chumby industries and ended up having to use JSON fairly frequently. Sometimes you don't get to choose what the source format is because you're consuming someone else's data feed, and if all they offer is JSON, you parse JSON. Also, on a 400-ish mhz ARM with 64 MB of RAM parsing reasonably sized JSON data is no big deal in native code. You need to further qualify your comments beyond just "embedded" because what you're now talking about (very low mhz, KB of RAM) is a niche within the larger embedded world.