Serialization Formats Benchmarks

This repository contains benchmarking code for different serialization formats across programing languages.

Sample data came from Farcaster.

Tested

Serialization Formats

• Protocol Buffers
• FlatBuffers
• Cap'n Proto

Programming Languages

• Go
• Rust

Results

Note Smaller is better

Go (17 Jan 2023)

• Benchmarks are CPU bound (no disk operations)
• OS: macOS 13.0.1
• CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8559U CPU @ 2.70GHz
• Protobuf: golang/protobuf
• Protobuf (gogofaster): gogoprotobuf
• FlatBuffers: google/flatbuffers v0.0.0-20230110200425-62e4d2e5b215
• Capnp: capnproto/go-capnproto2 v3.0.0-alpha.23

Test	Protobuf	Protobuf (gogofaster)	FlatBuffers	Capnp	Capnp (packed)
Encode (ns/op)	883.8	384.4	856.8	1709	2591
Decode (ns/op)	1179	496.2	18.89	830.8	1716
Wire format size (bytes)	299	299	432	440	344
Wire format size, gzipped (bytes)	323	323	406	392	368

Rust (20 Jan 2023)

• Benchmarks are CPU bound (no disk operations)
• OS: macOS 13.0.1
• CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8559U CPU @ 2.70GHz
• Protobuf (rust-protobuf): stepancheg/rust-protobuf 3.2.0
• Protobuf (prost): tokio-rs/prost 0.11.6
• FlatBuffers: google/flatbuffers 22.10.26

Test	Protobuf (rust-protobuf)	Protobuf (prost)	FlatBuffers
Encode (ns/op)	704.88	642.90	878.02
Decode (ns/op)	751.61	1058.7	331.12
Wire format size (bytes)	299	299	428