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I think you might want to make a distinction between a stream packet and a completed message.

If you're going for telnet compatibility then you'll want to terminate packets in CR+LF, but possibly expect to see only CR or LF from the client (ASCII mode).

Your stream could either be stateful (a message is always sent complete and in order, even if it takes multiple stream packets) or stateless* (different messages might have stream packets consecutively).

It would be more future proof if you started with a message grammar and then defined your protocol on top of that.

A binary-friendly client would be a hundred lines of code at most, versus inefficiency for a pretty standard protocol use-case forever.

You know you could have a length-prefix and a new-line. Best of both worlds.