Comment by ajross

Seems like this has nothing to do with Rust or protobufs. The underlying PostgreSQL abstraction engine they'd picked had a wasteful serialization implementation (that happens to have been using protobuf). So pgdog dropped it and open-coded a serialization-free transfer using the C API.

Well, yeah. If there's a feature you don't need, you'll see value by coding around it. Some features turn out not to be needed by anyone, maybe this is one. But some people need serialization, and that's what protobufs are for[1]. Those people are very (!) poorly served by headlines telling them to use Rust (!!) instead of serialization.

[1] Though as always the standard litany applies: you actually want JSON, and not protobus or ASN.1 or anything else. If you like some other technology better, you're wrong and you actually want JSON. If you think you need something faster, you probably don't and JSON would suit your needs better. If you really, 100%, know for sure that you need it faster than JSON, then you're probably isomorphic to the folks in the linked article, shouldn't have been serializing at all, and should get to work open coding your own hooks on the raw backend.