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I work on an embedded OS where our IPC buffer is only about 140 bytes.

Anything more requires multiple IPCs, with lots of expensive context switches.

Wasting even one precious byte on a pointless header would absolutely be an issue in this environment.

That makes sense. I've probably been thinking more about remote network protocols, where the time it takes for a message to reach its destination will be so large that the overhead for a few extra bytes per message is negligible; for a protocol used solely within a given local system, there would be a much lower threshold of acceptable overhead.

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