[andrew_rfc]

They were never particularly all that fast, especially not in the browser where support is far from acceptable. Most implementations rely on runtime magic, reflection, and other hacks.

So in that sense they aren’t all that modern as they’ve failed to evolve and keep up with platform evolutions.

Bebop just aims to generate code that modern and current with its target language, works everywhere, and avoids pitfalls protobuf suffers from.

[throwaway143829]

Have you seen protobuf.js? I've dug quite deep into its generated code and have not seen any runtime magic. It's just directly working with the protobuf wire format and transferring the data to/from fields with very explicit code.

I can't speak for Google's official implementation though.

[martinky24]

I see. So far protobufs have met my needs and I've been happy with them, but I've used them more in an RPC context and less as a browser based data unit, so that makes sense.

[TexasMick]

I benchmarked protobuf encoding and nanopb was very good.

Even though our schema was huge, it still did serialisation in a time that was surprisingly small for our underpowered chip.