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The original article's complaint wasn't (just) about 53 bits, but about using inefficient formats requiring constant serialization and deserialization for backend-to-backend communication.

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Protobuf or Thrift would require serialization as well? I still wouldn't do that (or, in fact, I am currently not doing that) before I have an incentive, i.e. performance problems. Of course, my services are all Nodejs at the moment, so JSON feels more natural there than it does in other environments.

One potentially nice thing about formats like Cap'n Proto is that they don't eagerly parse the message. You can just lazily grab the values you care about, which can be a big performance win if you typically only care about a few fields out of a larger message.

That's impossible with text-based formats like XML and JSON, because everything is fractally variable-length.

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