Comment by blanched
6 hours ago
That's what the person you replied to is talking about, and they're right. Putting aside the final byte size (where protobuf also wins), protobuf is faster at both encoding and decoding than json. There are numerous benchmarks you can find that show this.
The advantages of json are not related to performance.
doesn't seem universally true, https://github.com/protobufjs/protobuf.js/issues/2114#issue-...
If you're writing JS you cannot beat JSON.parse, because you're running the most optimized C++ implementation of JSON which will outcompete any decoder written JS itself.
Which is not a very generalizable situation.