prost VS shared-string

The benchmark is not comparing apples to apples.

prost is the most widely used Protobuf implementation in Rust, maintained by the Tokio organization. prost generates structs and serialization/deserialization code for you.

easyproto according to GitHib Search is used only by two projects. easyproto provides primitives for serializing and deserializing Protobuf, and requires hand writing code to do both.

A fair comparison would be prost vs google.golang.org/protobuf, or easyproto vs parts of quick-protobuf.

In most cases you can make Go as fast as Rust, but from my experience writing performance-sensitive code in Go requires significantly larger time investment and overall requires deeper language expertise. Pebble (RocksDB replacement in Go by CockroachDB) is a good example of this, the codebase is littered with hand-inlined[1] functions, hand-unrolled loops and it's not[2] even using Go memory management for performance critical parts, it's using the C memory allocator and manual memory management.

[prost]: https://github.com/tokio-rs/prost

You could use Protocol buffers to define a message type, then use prost to generate encoding/decoding code for that type.

Thanks but that doesn't seems to support `json_mapping` , there is a draft available but not sure when it will get merged https://github.com/tokio-rs/prost/pull/558

Hi r/rust, I have a question regarding tonic-build (or prost-build).

Currently, I'm making some stuff by using protobuf via prost. Maybe you know, protobuf v3 treats all fields as optional, so it is pain to unwrap every nested field.

Note: one additional key feature currently missing from Prost is Proto2 extensions.

A few weeks back i made a crate (shared-string) that more or less does what your describing in your post. But the underlying data structure is, preferably Rc or Arc if you need to use it between threads. I though about using Bytes but if you look at the imlementation it does a lot in the background. But never the less i changed Rc and Arc to Bytes to look how it would performance. When i saw the benchmarks i was discouraged, they weren't great. In my benchmark it was always slower than just using a String. Maybe somewhere i made a mistake or the benchmarks are not the right ones. Here the bytes implementation with some benchmark results: https://github.com/soerenmeier/shared-string/pull/1