Protobufs requires each end of the comms agreeing to the same schema. You'd need something that transmitted key names like JSON, YAML, TOML etc. If you wanted a binary format then you could send BSON (binary JSON), and murex does already support this. But pragmatically a standard command line (or even your average shell script) isn't going to be consuming the kind of data that is going to be latency heavy to the extent that the difference between JSON or BSON would impact the bandwidth of a pipe.
Worst case scenario and you're dealing with gigabytes or more of data, then you'd a streamable format like jsonlines where each command in a pipeline can run concurrently without waiting for the file to EOF before processing it. In those situations most binary serialisations aren't well optimised to solve.
Worst case scenario and you're dealing with gigabytes or more of data, then you'd a streamable format like jsonlines where each command in a pipeline can run concurrently without waiting for the file to EOF before processing it. In those situations most binary serialisations aren't well optimised to solve.