"Scott McMurray"
FWIW, I'm currently using binary files for some work because the text is huge and slow.
... down to 1.2 GiB instead of the 2.1 GiB for text ... It also makes my load time drop from a few minutes to a few seconds
This has been my (somewhat limited application domain) experience, as well. Almost all of the distributed systems I've worked on that used binary message data passing did so for both processing speed and compactness of the data. Most of the system architects understood the "brittleness" and drawbacks of the design (specially when floating point values were needed), but were willing to make the tradeoff. I'd love to be able to remove at least some of the code design and portability drawbacks for applications needing to pass (or read / write) binary data. Cliff