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btilly
I'm curious whether anyone outside of Google uses protocol buffers. I never heard of them before arriving here, but they are used everywhere internally. And they really do seem to live up to the performance claims.
wooster
I use them internally for a recommendation server, but will be moving away from them because they're extremely slow in Python.
houseabsolute
I thought there were two python implementations. The pure python one is slow and the C-based one is fast. Am I wrong?
wooster
I've only ever used the C implementation. It's slow.
pmjordan
I'm using them on a consulting project at the moment; C++ client and Java server.
simonw
Google were quite slow to open source protocol buffers - ex-Google engineers re-invented them at Facebook as Thrift and open sourced that first, which lessened their impact when they came out.

The real competition to protocol buffers though is JSON over HTTP, and that's easily fast enough for most purposes (most of Yahoo!'s internal web services use that combination, to my knowledge).