Oh my God. I'm genuinely struggling to avoid using an endless stream of profanity here. If our problem is that our observability tools suck, the solution is to improve these tools, not mutilate our IPC mechanism to accommodate the limitations of these tools.
The observability tools in question (strace) follow the UNIX tradition of displaying and processing data as text by default. I don’t think that means that they suck.
I’ll go even stronger than that: IPC and RPC should prefer plaintext-representable forms by default and only abandon them for binary once the real world costs of the textually-representable protocol are found to be unacceptable and unmitigateable.
The benefit of being able to use pre-existing introspection tools that were not designed with your protocol in mind—-and use those tools without extensive configuration—-is huge.
I think the existence of bad textual formats (e.g. JSON) and the presence of largely-orthogonal-to-binaryness useful affordances in popular binary formats (e.g. schema validation and strong typing in Protobuf) muddies the underlying truth: textual-representability-by-default is rarely costly and often a huge boon to protocol implementors and protocol debuggers.
Christ almighty, this is a terrible proposal.