[no_circuit]

Yes, I agree that protos usually should only be used at the serialization boundary, as well as the slightly off-topic idea that the generated code should be private to the package and/or binary.

So to reflect the real‑world practices, the benchmark code should then allocate and give the protobuf serializer an 8K Vec like in tonic, and not an empty one that may require multiple re-allocations?

[chaokunyang]

Yes, you are right. I missed this when I wrote the benchmark code. I will update the benchmark code and share the results here