Is Protocol buffers worth it?
Google’s Protocol Buffers is a “language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler” XML is slow and large. There’s no doubting that. JSON’s my default alternative, though it’s a bit large. CSV’s ideal for tabular data, but ragged hierarchies are a bit difficult. I was trying to see if Protocol Buffers would be smaller and faster, at least when using Python. I took JSON as the base, and checked the write speed, read speed and file sizes. Here’s the comparison: ...