While we're planning on open sourcing some things, I'm not sure we'll ever open source that one. Even though it was much faster, it didn't see much time in prod

While we're planning on open sourcing some things, I'm not sure we'll ever open source that one. Even though it was much faster, it didn't see much time in production due to the less than desirable impact it made (go Amdahl's law), and it still has some bugs and was highly customized to our specific protocol buffer definitions. Internally, Google has something faster for Python, but they haven't released it yet. You might try putting pressure on them here: https://code.google.com/p/protobuf/issues/detail?id=434 https://code.google.com/p/protobuf/issues/detail?id=434 http://yz.mit.edu/wp/fast-native-c-protocol-buffers-from-python/ http://yz.mit.edu/wp/fast-native-c-protocol-buffers-from-pyt... talks about the issues some more with some links to other rewrite attempts.