cfzjywxk / buffer-benchmarks

Benchmarking Protobuf, FlatBuffers, and Cap'n Proto on Go and Rust

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