[candiddevmike]

> encoding/gob is intended for streams, not stateless marshals/unmarshals

I don't understand this within the context of the rest of your comment. I use gob for marshaling stuff to storage all the time, I'm not aware of a better way to do that (serialize data to binary).

[bit_flipper]

Sorry, I should have been more precise. encoding/gob is not optimized for situations where you create an encoder or decoder, read/write a single value, then discard that encoder/decoder. As the author noted, payloads for a single call to Encode() are quite large. Additionally, re-instantiating a gob encoder for each call to Encode() is very expensive allocation-wise and benchmarks where this happens will show gob to perform poorly in these scenarios. You can certainly still use gob this way, and if the performance works for you then have at it! But it performs significantly better in situations where you make multiple calls to Encode() with the same encoder.

[throwaway894345]

The parent is saying that gob includes the type information in the serialized payload. This is extraneous information in many cases, and the result is an unnecessarily large payload.