Since the author seems to have a problem with text-based formats in general, here's a counterpoint by Mike Pall on the LuaJIT mailing list [1]: "On a tangent:

Since the author seems to have a problem with text-based formats in general, here's a counterpoint by Mike Pall on the LuaJIT mailing list [1]: "On a tangent: IMHO most binary serialization formats like BSON, MessagePack or Protocol Buffers are misdesigns. They add lots of complications to save a couple of bytes. But that does not translate into a substantial improvement of the parsing speed compared to a heavily tuned parser for a much simpler text-based format." [1] http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Adding-assembler-code-to-Lua-programs,12 http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/Adding-assembler-code-t...