I am very partial to msgpack. It has routinely met or exceeded my performance needs and doesn’t depend on weird code generation, and is super easy to set up.

Something that I don’t see talked about much with msgpack, but I think is cool: if your project doesn’t span across multiple languages, you can actually embed those language semantics into your encoder with extensions.

For example, in Clojure’s port of msgpack out of the box, you can use Clojure keywords out of the box and it will parse correctly without issue. You also can have it work with sets.

Obviously you could define some kind of mapping yourself and use any binary format to do this, ultimately the [en|de]coder is just using regular msgpack constructs behind the scenes, but i have always had to do that manually while with msgpack it seems like the libraries readily embrace it.

Indeed, the support is widespread across languages. OTOH, using compression, like basic gzip, for http responses, turns the text format into binary format and with http2 or http3 there is no overhead like it would be with http1. so in the end the binary aspect of these encoders might be obsolete for this use case, as long as one uses compression.