(also yeah, would be nice to replace Thrift; Stefano and I looked into Apache Thrift which is more maintained but they have like huge dependencies)

Oh I thought we used apache thrift? That's what we use in osquery-go.

errr, you are right, I mixed them up; fbthrift is more maintained but has 1000x dependencies

We could change the protocol and serialization as Seshu eludes to, I am unsure of the portability and compatibility effect. But JSON, which is what we use currently, is most likely the least efficient.