Going to reply to all your comments at this rate. ;-) Even with single-byte tags, the overhead can be quite significant; thus the packed = true option. Unfortu

Going to reply to all your comments at this rate. ;-) Even with single-byte tags, the overhead can be quite significant; thus the packed = true option. Unfortunately I don't have any public protocols or data to show you, but by switching to packed = true (combined with some extra tricks) I achieved ~40-60% savings on some of our datasets. We use protobufs for our stable storage, and this change certainly saved us more than my yearly compensation package. > For the next 2048 entries Yikes! I hope you never have to work with a message type with anywhere near 2048 fields! :-) In practice, more than half message types have less than 16 fields, which is why the "incredibly arbitrary situation" is justified, and really does end up saving a ton of storage. But, for simplicity, nothing can beat just ntohl and a cast.