[kentonv]

Funny thing is, despite all this, protobuf beats almost everything in benchmarks, in part due to excessive micro-optimization. Almost all varints in practice are 1-byte, so the larger ones don't really matter.

That said, the fact that you can't skip forward in a protobuf without parsing through all the previous fields is unfortunate in some use cases, hence Cap'n Proto.

[JonathonW]

Yeah, we've been pretty happy with protobuf in the projects where we've used it.

Cap'n Proto would've been a pretty strong contender if it had existed when we started using protobuf, though. Serialization/deserialization was on the critical path for our server-side code, so we most likely would have been able to get at least a bit of a performance boost out of Cap'n Proto.