Comment by anonymoushn
2 years ago
Probably for the same reason that there are so many more posts about anything that make claims than that explore evidence systematically, especially when the people making the posts stand to gain nothing by spending their time that way.
I encounter claims that "protobuf is faster than json" pretty regularly but it seems like nobody has actually benchmarked this. Typical protobuf decoder benchmarks say that protobuf decodes ~5x slower than json, and I don't think it's ~5x smaller for the same document, but I'm also not dedicating my weekend to convincing other people about this.
The problem with benchmarking that claim is there's no one true "json decoder" that everyone uses. You choose one based on your language -- JSON.stringify if you're using JS, serde_json if you're using Rust, etc.
So what people are actually saying is, a typical protobuf implementation decodes faster than a typical JSON implementation for a typical serialized object -- and that's true in my experience.
Tying this back into the thread topic of search engine results, I googled "protobuf json benchmark" and the first result is this Golang benchmark which seems relevant. https://shijuvar.medium.com/benchmarking-protocol-buffers-js... Results for specific languages like "rust protobuf json benchmark" also look nice and relevant, but I'm not gonna click on all these links to verify.
In my experience programming searches tend to get much better results than other types of searches, so I think the article's claim still holds.
I agree. You wouldn't use encoding/json or serde-json if you had to deserialize a lot of json and you cared about latency, throughput, or power costs. A typical protobuf decoder would be better.