Josh Haberman

I haven’t posted many status updates for upb lately. Sometimes that means I’m busy with other things, but right now it means I am working on it feverishly and can hardly stand to take a break from it.

I’m extremely happy with how it’s shaping up. It’s getting more and more complete, and yet still staying quite “micro.” Notably, it just recently crossed 1500 lines of C (I don’t count auto-generated code in this), and it compiles to not quite 10kb of object code. Throw in the auto-generated code (reflection data that describes the types in descriptor.proto — this is what allows loading other proto definitions at runtime) and this jumps to about 16kb. Keep in mind that this effectively has all the major features of the main protobuf implementation (albeit packaged in different ways), but the main protobuf implementation is just over 1MB of object code!

I still think I can reach the main protobuf implementation’s performance, or maybe even exceed it. I will consider the project a failure if I can’t get within 15% of its performance.

Anyway, just wanted to be sure everyone knows I’m still alive and very much working on this. Now back to work.