Thanks for the shout-out! Yes, I do have nice things to say about ASN.1. It's all the others that mostly suck, with a few exceptions like XDR and DCE/Microsoft RPC's IDL.

Derail accepted! Is your approval of DCE based only on the serialization not being TLV or on something else too? I have to say, while I do think its IDL is tasteful, its only real distinguishing feature is AFAICT the array-passing/returning stuff, and that feels much too specialized to make sense of in anything but C (or largely-isomorphic low-level languages like vernacular varieties of Pascal).

Well, I do disapprove of the RPC-centric nature of both, XDR and DCE RPC, and I disapprove of the emphasis on "pointers" and -in the case of DCE- support for circular data structures and such. The 1980s penchant for "look ma'! I can have local things that are remote and you can't tell because I'm pretending that latency isn't part of the API hahahaha" research really shows in these. But yeah, at least they ain't TLV encodings, and the syntax is alright.

I especially like XDR, though maybe that's because I worked at Sun Microsystems :)

"Pointers" in XDR are really just `OPTIONAL` in ASN.1. Seems so silly to call them pointers. The reason they called them "pointers" is that that's how they represented optionality in the generated structures and code: if the field was present on the wire then the pointer is not null, and if it was absent the then pointer is null. And that's exactly what one does in ASN.1 tooling, though maybe with a host language Optional<> type rather than with pointers and null values. Whereas in hand-coded ASN.1 codecs one does sometimes see special values used as if the member had been `DEFAULT` rather than `OPTIONAL`.