Abhishek Goyal <abgoyal(a)gmail.com> writes:
Having dealt with custom binary formats for large
amounts of data quite a
bit, I tend to recommend against doing that if standard options can instead
be used: there are a large number of pitfalls in going binary, both when
writing the data, as well as when reading it back;
A message full of excellent points. I failed to think of hdf5/protobuf
and all the rest of the great suggestions. So I will second the notion
that a custom binary format is very likely not a good idea.