This is a confusing article. Does the author know about byte alignments? Or that read&#x2F;write binary values like floats is just a quick way to run into platform&#x2F;portability issues if relevant? Or investigating how any RDBMS serializes and reads data as fast as possible? Or really any research related to the field? What about comparing spinning disk via ssd? Or even how libpng works? Or the complexity of ASN.1 notation (used for TLS certificates and many other things)?<p>Protobuf solves a completely different problem than &#x27;load a file from disk,&#x27; which at least FlatBuffers does.<p>It seems like the only complaint the author has is that it doesn&#x27;t work particularly at the level of abstraction they prefer. The FlatBuffers timing results also seem dubious because of the lack of profiling to say what is killing the time. Are the comparisions ruining pipelining? Why not write a transpiler to glue the protobuf output to something you actually want?<p>It&#x27;s hard to get past the first half with any confidence in methodology of testing, especially when the author leads with &#x27;Loading things from disk is a surprisingly unsolved problem in C++.&#x27;