Sending structure over tcp link

Hi!
Want to find out what is the best way in terms of efficient and simplicity of implementation to transfer message from a specific type?

The problem that i want to solve is that I want every message to be from the form of {title, body, timeStamp} but until now I used buffers and sent only byte messages.

The efficiency is important to me in my use case. I heard about protobuf. is it the best solution for me?

And a second question on that topic is, if I’m developing on a windows machine but working with Ubuntu terminals using WSL, should I install the protoc (the protobuf compiler) in a windows or Linux version?