The internal standard for when speed of protocol buffer operations matters is to use the C++ protocol buffer code but use swig to wrap it for python. Unfortunat

The internal standard for when speed of protocol buffer operations matters is to use the C++ protocol buffer code but use swig to wrap it for python. Unfortunately, this is really easy internally due to protocol buffer integration with our build system, but not easy externally since most people don't have a build phase for their python projects.