Comment by jpalepu33

The title is misleading but the actual work is impressive - they optimized their Protobuf usage, not replaced it entirely.

This is a common pattern: "We switched to X and got 5x faster" often really means "We fixed our terrible implementation and happened to rewrite it in X."

Key lessons from this:

1. Serialization/deserialization is often a hidden bottleneck, especially in microservices where you're doing it constantly 2. The default implementation of any library is rarely optimal for your specific use case 3. Benchmarking before optimization is critical - they identified the actual bottleneck instead of guessing

For anyone dealing with Protobuf performance issues, before rewriting: - Use arena allocation to reduce memory allocations - Pool your message objects - Consider if you actually need all the fields you're serializing - Profile the actual hot path

Rust FFI has overhead too. The real win here was probably rethinking their data flow and doing the optimization work, not just the language choice.