[serbrech]

The partial decoding is also interesting for another case, I think: polymorphism. The OneOf implementation in go protobuf is ugly, but this trick could make it bareable. I'll have to explore further :)

[tignaj]

Here is a OneOf Go implementation I wrote that hopefully is less ugly and is significantly faster: https://github.com/splunk/exp-lazyproto#oneof-fields