Benchmark request - flexbuffers and avro

[insanitybit]

The benchmarks right now compare NoProto to formats that are fairly different - either the data carries along a schema (json), or the schema is precompiled (protobuf).

I think flexbuffers and avro are probably much better comparisons, as they're both formats where the schemas can be loaded dynamically. I think it would be very interesting to see comparisons to those two.

[only-cliches]

Hey thanks for the issue, that's a good idea.

I didn't realize how much NoProto has in common with Apache Avro! I got the benchmarks together, results below:

Library	Encode	Decode All	Decode 1	Update 1	Size (bytes)	Size (Zlib)
Runtime Libs
NoProto	1057	1437	47619	12195	208	166
Apache Avro	138	51	52	37	702	336
FlexBuffers	401	855	23256	264	490	309
JSON	550	438	544	396	439	184
BSON	115	103	109	80	414	216
MessagePack	135	222	237	119	296	187
Compiled Libs
Flatbuffers	1046	14706	250000	1065	264	181
Bincode	5882	8772	9524	4016	163	129
Protobuf	859	1140	1163	480	154	141
Prost	1225	1866	1984	962	154	142

The most popular Apache Avro library ,avro-rs is disappointing from a performance perspective. There's no reason it can't be as fast as NoProto (I studied the Avro docs). I feel like the only thing making NoProto so much faster in this case is the better Rust implementation.

I feel super proud that NoProto is beating out Flexbuffers, I didn't expect that result. I'll have these benchmarks in the next release!

[insanitybit]

Yeah, avro and noproto seem sort of analagous to protobuf and capnproto, so I thought the comparison was appropriate. Very interesting to see these results - I'm in agreement that there's nothing fundamental to avro that makes it as slow as it is, really most of avro could be zero-copy even, similar to how protobuf is.

Great to see beating out flexbuffers. Pretty cool project, I really look forward to watching it.

I also wonder if that size comparison is maybe including the schema with avro? Avro by default will attach the schema to the data, but that's not fundamental - you can remove it.