I wonder what Google is thinking about the v2 performance.
It's well known that protobuf processing is taxing heavy on their data center [1]. It's hard to imagine they just leave it slow. Or do they?
There was a project to develop a asic (probably bundled inside NIC) to do protobuf parsing. At some point Sanjay did a change to proto API that rendered that project less appealing.
Disclaimer: Google had a lot of internal stuff they considered important to their core tech competencies. For example, no open source about Google paxos APIs and infrastructure, networking, etc.
[1] https://research.google/pubs/pub44271/