Have you run benchmarks on this? If so, can you link me to them? It would be relatively easy to modify protobuf's parsing code to operate on the encoded byte r

Have you run benchmarks on this? If so, can you link me to them? It would be relatively easy to modify protobuf's parsing code to operate on the encoded byte rather than decoding field tags. If it's worth doing I'll do it. BTW, the default parsing code has no loops in the fast-path. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I think both 1 and 2 byte cases are inlined. (Avoiding the loops is great for these cases, since default branch prediction will often be wrong.) All tags under 16 are one byte. Also, in my experience IO has always been the bottleneck -- my CPU can easily keep up with 1 or 10 gig pipes I have access to.