We've had a similar argument internally. In load testing, we're not bounded by the speed of our JSON parsing, and if we were we'd probably just swap that endpoi

We've had a similar argument internally. In load testing, we're not bounded by the speed of our JSON parsing, and if we were we'd probably just swap that endpoint to use a different message body provider before moving to a totally binary RPC model. Especially in the Java world, where Jackson + Afterburner is fast enough for most cases. Protobufs/Thrift will smoke it in most performance tests, true enough, but when you're waiting on a database or algorithm to run, what's JSON serialization? There's certainly benefits at extreme scale, but not enough to justify the loss of tooling that comes with it until necessary.