I saw this PR, and there didn’t seem to be any explanation there. I’m guessing something performance related? I just don’t think I’ve ever seen a project use both protobuf and flatbuffers at the same time, so it made me curious!
@ibrahim , I’d love to know that too.
Gorgonia does use both protobuf and flatbuffers. There are benefits to either.
As the maintainer of that, I can give you some reasons why my project uses both:
Flatbuffers allow for much much faster deserialization (basically none at all!) but PB are more compressed, allowing for more efficient over-the-wire communications. In the case of Gorgonia, over-the-wire comms are done with PB, but storage is done either in FB or gob (which is slow but hey the community seems to love that idea…)
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Protocol buffers take a lot of memory in Go. And we have to pay the cost of unmarshal. So we use FB in critical paths.
FB APIs suck though.
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We use flatbuffers for table index which comes from a SST file that’s memory mapped. This saves us a lot of memory (no memory copy required). If we were to use protobuf for those indices, we need to make a copy of the entire index into the protobuf.
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