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Why reinvent on-disk data formats when you can just make a file of protocol buffers? https://code.google.com/p/protobuf/

Why reinvent binary serialization when you could use ASN.1, or any of the thousand binary serialization formats that pre-date protobufs?

For that specific example, you can find a good discussion here: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/protobuf/eNAZlnPKV...

Ironically that has already been reinvented in the form of Cap'n Proto: http://kentonv.github.io/capnproto/

(other than that I agree it's a good solution)