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Comment by billconan | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if json + simdjson will outperform protobuf.

I'm picking a protocol for my project. I was looking at protobuf, but this post made me think otherwise.

Yes, even though protobuf is a binary format, it is slower to parse than JSONs with simdjson. Counterintuitive, but that is the power hardware acceleration :)

Thank you! Yes, I saw a benchmark somewhere else that also says simdjson is faster than protobuf.

Is it also the case for floating point data?

I know about fast_float (which is by the same author as simdjson), however my believe is that binary format is impossible to beat here.

Most protobuf implementations are unfortunately not a good example of high-performance binary serialization code (but still better than the average JSON serialization library! And Go, C# (it provides protobuf almost out of box), Java and Rust implementations appear to be decent).

However, your use case is likely doesn't need to process multi-gigabit traffic in JSON requests. Therefore, protobuf, or more specifically, gRPC will be just fine.

Speaking of Go, there's a simdjson implementation for golang too:

> Performance wise, simdjson-go runs on average at about 40% to 60% of the speed of simdjson. Compared to Golang's standard package encoding/json, simdjson-go is about 10x faster.

I haven't tried it yet but I don't really need that speed.

https://github.com/minio/simdjson-go

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