Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a superset of JSON's schema that's faster and more compact. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049 http://cbor.io/ import cbor "github.com/brianolson/cbor_go" This implementation attempts to do serialization to/from struct types using reflection, but doesn't do 100% of cases like that right. It should do everything fine serializing map[string]interface{} and []interface{} and other basic types. It passes the test of decoding 100% of CBOR common appendix test strings. For Python implementation see: https://github.com/brianolson/cbor_py