@indutny/protopiler

Just because there are many existing protobuf libraries for JavaScript it doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to create one more.

Selling Points

When compared to protobufjs this library:

• Faster (+5% decode/+32% encode)
• No 3rd party dependencies
• Almost instant compilation
• 2x smaller produced code (after minification)
• Native big integer support
• Native typescript support (via generated .d.ts file)
• Unknown field support
• No classes or prototype inheritance. Just plain JS objects in and out.

Unsupported features

This is unambitious project so we do not intend to support (at least for now):

• rpc
• map<a, b>
• protobuf editions
• extensions/custom options
• ...and probably a lot of other things!

However we do support what we consider to be a typical protobuf usage (scalar, repeated, oneof fields; enums, messages, bytes, strings).

Installation

npm install -g @indutny/protopiler

Usage

To compile source protobuf files into javascript run:

protopiler my.proto --output out.mjs --typedefs out.d.mts

If my.proto has the following contents:

package test;

message MyMessage {
  string key = 1;
  repeated uint32 values = 2;
}

The following JS snippet could be used to encode/decode the MyMessage:

import { test } from './out.mjs';

// Encode JS object into a Uint8Array
const data = test.MyMessage.encode({
  key: 'test-key',
  values: [1, 2, 3],
});

// Decode Uint8Array back into a JS object
const decoded = test.MyMessage.decode(data);
console.log(decoded);
// Prints:
// { '$unknown': [], key: 'test-key', values: [ 1, 2, 3 ] }

Benchmarks

On MacBook Air M2:

$ pnpm install
$ cd benchmarks
$ pnpm start -d 60 -s 1000
protobuf.mjs/decode:   2’386’421.9 ops/sec (±9’533.9, p=0.001, o=68/1000) severe outliers=44
protopiler.mjs/decode: 2’922’101.3 ops/sec (±4’707.1, p=0.001, o=17/1000) severe outliers=1
protobuf.mjs/encode:   1’085’274.8 ops/sec (±1’928.4, p=0.001, o=50/1000) severe outliers=29
protopiler.mjs/encode: 1’380’961.1 ops/sec (±1’598.2, p=0.001, o=13/1000) severe outliers=1

LICENSE

This software is licensed under the MIT License.