quick-protobuf

The benchmark is not comparing apples to apples. prost is the most widely used Protobuf implementation in Rust, maintained by the Tokio organization. prost generates structs and serialization/deserialization code for you. easyproto according to GitHib Search is used only by two projects. easyproto provides primitives for serializing and deserializing Protobuf, and requires hand writing code to do both. A fair comparison would be prost vs google.golang.org/protobuf, or easyproto vs parts of quick-protobuf. In most cases you can make Go as fast as Rust, but from my experience writing performance-sensitive code in Go requires significantly larger time investment and overall requires deeper language expertise. Pebble (RocksDB replacement in Go by CockroachDB) is a good example of this, the codebase is littered with hand-inlined[1] functions,

Idiomatic quick-protobuf is much faster than non-idiomatic rust-protobuf: https://github.com/tafia/quick-protobuf/tree/master/perftest

I actually went through all projects listed in [1] because I remember this very quirk. It turns out that there are many such libraries that have two variants of encode/decode functions, where the second variant prepends a varint length. In my brief inspection there do exist a few libraries with only the second variant (e.g. Rust quick-protobuf), which is legitimately problematic [2]. But if the project in question was indeed protobuf.js (see loeg's comments), it clearly distinguishes encode/decode vs. encodeDelimited/decodeDelimited. So I believe the project should not be blamed, and the better question would be why so many people chose to add this exact helper. Well, because Google itself also had the same helper [3] [4]! So at this point protobuf should just standardize this simple framing format [5], instead of claiming that protobuf h