Comment by cryptonector

Here's the problem though: people have used the absence of tooling to justify the creation of new, supposedly-superior schemas and codecs that by definition have strictly less tooling available on day zero and which invariably turn out to be worse than ASN.1/DER were in 1984 because the authors also refused to study the literature to see what good ideas they could pick up. That's how we end up with:

- PB being a TLV encoding, just like DER, with all the same problems

   (Instead PB should have been inspired by XDR or OER, but not DER.)

 - PB's IDL requiring explicitly tagging every field of every data structure(!) even though ASN.1 never required tagging every field, and even though ASN.1 eventually adopted automatic tagging.

 - PB's very naive approach to extensibility that is just like 1984 ASN.1's.

Some people, when faced with a dearth of tooling, will write said tooling. Other people will say that the technology in question is a nightmare, and some of those people will then go on to invent a worse wheel.

I'd be ecstatic to use something other than ASN.1 if it wasn't a poor reinvention of it.