I find that this is super convenient that this is happening during COVID restrictions.
I'm not needing a taxi/uber/lyft for leaving the bar. I'm not going out to a restaurant with friends. I'm not traveling for work/fun and needing an lift to the hotel.
My usage of uber/lyft/taxis went from 100s per month down to 0. If this change happened in 2019, I'd of had significant changes to my daily routine. Today, this changes nothing.
> and serialization is often only a few percent of that
A few percent is a huge performance win. For example shaving 5% off the latency of twitter / facebook's apis is huge. Thing about the compute, energy and bottom line impacts.
I do agree for many protobuf is overkill, there's way lower hanging fruit that will give a greater latency reduction.
When using Protobuf on a non-compressed environment, the requests took 78% less time than the JSON requests. This shows that the binary format performed almost 5 times faster than the text format. And, when issuing these requests on a compressed environment, the difference was even bigger. Protobuf performed 6 times faster, taking only 25ms to handle requests that took 150ms on a JSON format.