[skybrian]

Right, but nobody's going to set that for every single protobuf field.

[ambrice]

You're right. The only people that would use it are people that a) care enough about optimization to switch out shorter tag names and b) don't care enough about optimization to switch to binary format. Probably not many..

[skybrian]

Except everyone who is doing RPC in a browser. Not sure why that is, but binary formats aren't popular. We still care about performance.