roger peppe writes:

> the documentation says, on writing fields in order: "This allows
> parsing code to use optimizations
> that rely on field numbers being in sequence."
>
> what optimizations might these be?
> does the current implementation use any such optimizations?
> what penalty do i pay by *not* writing fields in order?

The C++ generator does this.  If you look at some of the generated
MergePartialFromCodedStream() methods, you can see how this is done.

The code peeks at the next tag, and if it has the expected
(in-sequence) value, needs only a single conditional branch to go to
the correct handler.  If the fields are not in order, the parser must
find the correct handler through a switch statement.  Due to the
difficulty of predicting the path that will be taken by that switch,
this can save considerable time on deeply pipelined CPUs.

Michael Poole

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