Comment by asa400

Whenever people bring up binary formats I have to bring up Erlang External Term Format (ETF)[0].

It's the native format Erlang nodes use to serialize data to communicate with each other, but it's just a simple Type-Length-Value binary format, so anything can implement it.

It's small enough that you can create a reasonably complete and fast implementation of it for your language in an afternoon. It's self-describing, so if you can read ETF you can read any ETF message, as there are no out of band schemas. I love it.

[0] - https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_ext_dist.html