Re the failure part: you can just plug in any USB stick with a normal linux distro and it will read it out just fine.
Re performance: Strings are most defintely worse than some fixed size format. It’s not an accident that FPGAs were used to serialize/deserialize XMLs, why Google made a whole new binary protocol, etc. Just think about it, you have to parse a string character by character (yeah some clever vector magic can make some string processing go a few chars at a time), while a binary format with fixed layout will be practically random access. You can query the nth entry, etc.
Re performance: Strings are most defintely worse than some fixed size format. It’s not an accident that FPGAs were used to serialize/deserialize XMLs, why Google made a whole new binary protocol, etc. Just think about it, you have to parse a string character by character (yeah some clever vector magic can make some string processing go a few chars at a time), while a binary format with fixed layout will be practically random access. You can query the nth entry, etc.