[thinkharderdev]

> Protobuf is intentionally designed to NOT require any parsing at all

This is not true at all. If you have a language-specific class codegen'd by protoc then the in-memory representation of that object is absolutely not the same as the serialized representation. For example:

1. Integer values are varint encoded in the wire format but obviously not in the in-memory format

2. This depends on the language of course but variable length fields are stored inline in the wire format (and length-prefixed) while the in-memory representation will typically use some heap-allocated type (so the in-memory representation has a pointer in that field instead of the data stored inline)