Hi everyone,
I’ve been working on this protobuf library for 3 years. We use it in the company I work for, EasyMile, to communicate with our autonomous vehicles.
As you can imagine, reliability is very important! Therefore, a lot of efforts have been put into making sure that the library is reliable. To this end, I committed to make it pass all the 1302 conformance tests that Google provides for binary serialization. This is on top of having a 100% code coverage, plus property based testing and dialyzer.
In order to assess the performance of protox, I benchmarked it with random and handmade inputs against the other available libraries, exprotobuf and protobuf-elixir. You can find these benchmarks here (zip archive of a benchee HTML export). They show that protox is always faster than exprotobuf and most of the time on par or faster than protobuf-elixir. Of course, the result might be different with another computer/OS and with different inputs, I’ll be happy to include new ones.
Also, I think that protox is easier to use as it let you work directly with Elixir structures (for instance, there’s no need to use a new
function to create a protobuf message, which means that you’ll have a nice error if you use a wrong field name). Furthermore, there’s no need to generate any file.
But of course, I may be a little biased here .
[Edit] It seems that file generation is important for some users, so I guess I should find a way to make it possible after all!
You can find it here: https://github.com/ahamez/protox. Let me know what you think!