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Comment by okanat | Hacker News Reader

Protobuf simply encode things way more efficient that JSON can define a single object. You're quite frankly spewing bullshit in this whole thread.

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You don’t get what they say. It’s not about about how efficient it is after encode, it’s about how fast encode is. They are not spewing bs, they’re focusing on a single point. The question is: do you send it over the wite more often than performing encode/decode.

That's what the person you replied to is talking about, and they're right. Putting aside the final byte size (where protobuf also wins), protobuf is faster at both encoding and decoding than json. There are numerous benchmarks you can find that show this.

The advantages of json are not related to performance.

No, protobuf is not faster, not on Python, because google's implementation is poor. Python is the #1 language in the world right now. Don't use protobuf.

That's not the lesson I'm taking away from this. Imagine how much faster the code would be if you didn't use Python.

doesn't seem universally true, https://github.com/protobufjs/protobuf.js/issues/2114#issue-...

If you're writing JS you cannot beat JSON.parse, because you're running the most optimized C++ implementation of JSON which will outcompete any decoder written JS itself.

Which is not a very generalizable situation.

Ok but that's the point. You are just explaining why the 'protobuf is faster' claim is generally false.

It is generally correct. When both implementations are completely in the same language Protobuf will win. Instead of a pure-JS implementation one can also make a FFI module for Protobuf.

The comparison that's being made is equivalent to implementing quick sort in Python and bubble sort in C++ and then declaring bubble sort is the better alternative.

Anyone with a healthy understading of computer science and programming experience will not make bullshit claims like that.

You say 'generally correct', but then to make it correct you have to make a bunch of specific constraints. That's not general. I'm comparing the FFI using library in python to the json library in python, and json is faster for me. I showed how in the post. You are welcome to find my mistake.

I was the grandparent reply and I meant to only carve out "you cannot write anything in JavaScript faster than anything written in tuned C, and json.parse is the latter".

Which link were you comparing FFI in python to json in python? The link I see seems to be about pure JavaScript language Protobuf impls vs json.parse?

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