@ireneista @zzt I'm saying json can be smaller than binary when the latter is fixed width for the worst case. ASCII decimal gets you slightly over 3.3 bits/byte. Fixed width binary is 8b/B, but must be sized for the worst case, often with coarse granularity (1, 2, 4, or 8 bytes). It's not rare for the typical value < sqrt(worst case), especially once the worst case is rounded up to a nice bitwidth.