[innagadadavida]

Protobufs have a pretty nice variable encoding integer wire format. This gives you the flexibility of saving space without doing compression.

While zero copy is nice, you cannot make it work when using compression.

[rapsey]

That variable integer encoding is however slow for encoding/decoding. The space savings are of questionable worth.

[seriesf]

They are the same size as UTF-8 numbers but much slower to decode. I think the more-bit format is the only glaring mistake in proto that can never be fixed.