Piping primitives, lists, structs instead of text?

The inventor of Unix pipes said,

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal in开发者_开发技巧terface.

Within the same system I'd like to see this concept done with, instead of text streams, an agreed upon binary data format (maybe primitives, lists, structures). This would avoid each program having to encode data to text only to be parsed again by the next program.

In my mind the programs would have libraries to convert to/from the binary format, or better yet use the binary format natively.

Has anyone created a set of utils in the same spirit as standard Unix utils that does something like above?

Yes - Windows powershell does pretty much this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell

Clearly - I understand that it's not a linux thing, but "somebody" has done this - and yup its pretty powerful.