pbf VS sia

does it beat https://github.com/mapbox/pbf ?

at least in the frontend (without WASM), it depends.

i tested https://github.com/mapbox/pbf and while it was faster for deep/complex structs vs an unoptimized/repetative JSON blob, it was slower at shallow structs and flat arrays of stuff. if you spend a bit of time encode stuff as flat arrays to avoid mem alloc, JSON parsing wins by a lot since it goes through highly optimized C or assembly, while decoding protobuf in the JIT does not.

The runtime is taken from mapbox/pbf (with basic type definitions)

Prior to version v0.11.0, Clio used JSON for serialization. JSON is available everywhere and it’s fairly fast, so at first, it might sound like a good idea to go with JSON. Unfortunately, as soon as we start serializing custom types with JSON, its performance degrades to the point that it’s not efficient anymore. To solve this issue, I created a serialization library for JavaScript named Sia, and to boost its serialization performance to the next level, I also designed a new text encoding which I called utfz. I spent over a year optimizing these two libraries, and as a result, managed to make Sia so fast that the pure JavaScript version of it beats even the performance of the native serialization libraries available for Node.js!