Really not a big fan of batteries included opinionated protocols.

Even Cap'n Proto and Protobuf is too much for me.

My particular favorite is this. But then I'm biased coz I wrote it haha.

https://github.com/Foundation42/libtuple

No, but seriously, it has some really nice properties. You can embed JSON like maps, arrays and S-Expressions recursively. It doesn't care.

You can stream it incrementally or use it a message framed form.

And the nicest thing is that the encoding is lexicographically sortable.

That link is dead