Compared to beefcake, for 100 000 iterations.
Beefcake (source)
Rehearsed (via Ruby's Benchmark.bmbm method):
ruby bench/simple.rb
user system total real
message creation 0.580000 0.010000 0.590000 ( 0.597887)
message encoding 2.130000 0.010000 2.140000 ( 2.152908)
message decoding 2.940000 0.010000 2.950000 ( 3.006080)
protobuf.cr (source)
crystal run --release bench/simple.cr
user system total real
message creation 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ( 0.005799)
message encoding 0.070000 0.020000 0.090000 ( 0.086418)
message decoding 0.050000 0.010000 0.060000 ( 0.051049)