a) short fourcc header for every command with command type and data length. Therefore no command separator and no newline/space/or_whatever escaping is needed (I know, the byte-order differences on various OSes but hey, sockets implementation deals with the same problem and it's working fine... htons, ntohl etc...  what's faster? Swapping of two bytes from the header or parsing the data for [end] separator? Not all messages are sent in one piece...)

I have to say I would also like to see a length field for logical packets in
the protocol. Second best would be \0 as a separator.

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John Bäckstrand