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Do you have any links showing protobuf is faster? There's nothing in your comment that hadn't already been said before by sibling commenters but as far as I've

Do you have any links showing protobuf is faster? There's nothing in your comment that hadn't already been said before by sibling commenters but as far as I've seen in the real world JSON appears to be faster in practice. Which is all that counts. Yours and the many other commenters making the same assumption (it's binary ergo it must be fast) make a really good case for PB's adoption being rooted in theoretical assumptions rather than real-world benefit. I get it. It makes sense that it should be faster. Nothing is self evident though. You gotta measure it.

afavour 4y ago
> In our tests, it was demonstrated that this protocol performed up to 6 times faster than JSON. https://auth0.com/blog/beating-json-performance-with-protobuf/ https://auth0.com/blog/beating-json-performance-with-protobu...
- cldellow 4y ago
  The 6 times faster benchmark from that article is describing a Java server and Java client. This thread is about protobuf vs JSON in a JavaScript environment. The article you linked _does_ talk about JavaScript environments, too, but the numbers are much less impressive.
dekhn 4y ago
I don't really get your attitude here. In particular, I'm not disagreeing that JSON parsers in the browser could be currently faster than protocol buffers. I'm saying that computer science and hardware dictate that protocol buffers are faster for a wide range of reasons. That part's not in question- smaller data encodings have better cache use, and require far fewer dictionary (hash table) lookups at parse time, as well as far length work parsing strings. If you want to argue against my point there I don't know what to say. If it was a priority to write a blindingly fast protocol buffer parser in JS, it's almost certain than an expert could write a faster one than a similar JSON parser.
- lucideer 4y ago
  > I don't really get your attitude here My attitude here is that I made a specific observation: JSON is likely to be faster or at least negligibly slower in browsers in practice. Everyone is replying either with theoretical speed comparisons or server-to-server non-JavaScript benchmarks, which don't seem relevant to my very specific observation I made up top...
- yencabulator 4y ago
  If you had bothered to benchmark it, you'd have realized that lots of protobuf libraries are actually surprisingly slow.

afavour 4y ago

> In our tests, it was demonstrated that this protocol performed up to 6 times faster than JSON. https://auth0.com/blog/beating-json-performance-with-protobuf/ https://auth0.com/blog/beating-json-performance-with-protobu...

cldellow 4y ago
The 6 times faster benchmark from that article is describing a Java server and Java client. This thread is about protobuf vs JSON in a JavaScript environment. The article you linked _does_ talk about JavaScript environments, too, but the numbers are much less impressive.

dekhn 4y ago

I don't really get your attitude here. In particular, I'm not disagreeing that JSON parsers in the browser could be currently faster than protocol buffers. I'm saying that computer science and hardware dictate that protocol buffers are faster for a wide range of reasons. That part's not in question- smaller data encodings have better cache use, and require far fewer dictionary (hash table) lookups at parse time, as well as far length work parsing strings. If you want to argue against my point there I don't know what to say. If it was a priority to write a blindingly fast protocol buffer parser in JS, it's almost certain than an expert could write a faster one than a similar JSON parser.

lucideer 4y ago
> I don't really get your attitude here My attitude here is that I made a specific observation: JSON is likely to be faster or at least negligibly slower in browsers in practice. Everyone is replying either with theoretical speed comparisons or server-to-server non-JavaScript benchmarks, which don't seem relevant to my very specific observation I made up top...
yencabulator 4y ago
If you had bothered to benchmark it, you'd have realized that lots of protobuf libraries are actually surprisingly slow.