I mean ASCII is rather decent for sending small stubs of information, like lighting up a single led or something. But when wanting to send a lof of commands and information it feels a bit unecessary to do all this from scratch using byte-by-byte ASCII. In my particular case I want to interface with a robot, sending both commands and receving information. Sure, I've gotten it to work but I think it was a bit of a hassle. It would be weird if somebody else hadn't implemented some nice generalised structure for this already that could be reused.