Java has ByteBuffer, Javascript has TypedArrays, Python has the "struct" module, and other languages have other fine ways of reading raw data in this kind of format. Some languages may lack the ability to inline calls well enough for true zero-copy to be efficient, but the worst case is you fall back to parsing the message upfront like you would with any other encoding. That upfront parse is still going to be faster, because it's just easier to read fixed-width values than variable-width.