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I've been working on a library[1] that aims to have fairly complete support for the procfs filesystem, so that you can hide away these annoying parsing quirks. But for some casual usage of /proc/ where you only need one tiny bit of information, it's often better to just roll your own parser instead of bringing in a 3rd party library. It's these small one-off cases that would really benefit from a standardized serialization format like you propose.
[1] https://github.com/eminence/procfs
The /proc//* hierarchy has always been a bit of a mess to parse.
/proc//maps is similarly frustrating: there's no clear distinction between "special" maps (like the stack) and a file that might just happen to be named `[stack]`. Similarly, the handling for a mapped region on a deleted file is simply to append " (deleted)"[1].
[1]: https://github.com/woodruffw/procmaps.rs/blob/79bd474104e9b3...
Neat! Your parser [1] almost has a similar issue because a comm could contain parenthesis, e.g., `foo) R 123 456`. But since a comm is limited to 64 bytes, I don't think it is possible to fit a fully matching string inside of the comm before the closing parent after the comm, which would thus make your regexp fail to match.
[1] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc/blob/master/jc/parsers/...
JSON can be parsed very quickly: https://github.com/simdjson/simdjson
CBOR could be another option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBOR
I noticed this around a year ago when writing a /proc/paid/stat parser for git (for logging the chain of parent processes).
Here's that commit, it has a comment with an overview of the kernel limits and caveats involved: https://github.com/git/git/commit/2d3491b117c6dd08e431acc390...