It took me a long time to realize that marshal/unmarshal functions should not operate on streams. You're just translating to/from an object in memory anyway, so the unbounded nature of streams doesn't buy you anything.
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Marshalling into a buffer, on the other hand, allows for crucial optimizations like reusing memory. The real kicker, at least in Go, is that writing to an io.Writer forces a heap allocation. Marshalling is definitely an area where you want to aim for zero allocations.
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Buffers are also nice for unmarshalling, because they force you to frame your messages with their size; consequently, you'll know up front how large of an object to expect, and can abort if it's too large. Plus you can read the whole object in one syscall, another performance win