Funny thing is, despite all this, protobuf beats almost everything in benchmarks, in part due to excessive micro-optimization. Almost all varints in practice are 1-byte, so the larger ones don&#x27;t really matter.<p>That said, the fact that you can&#x27;t skip forward in a protobuf without parsing through all the previous fields is unfortunate in some use cases, hence Cap&#x27;n Proto.