Improve (de-)serialization performance for scalar arrays #517
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Fixes #515
Since (de-)serialization is implemented purely in Python, it is quite slow compared to native implementations. I try to circumvent that issue by not deserializing repeated scalar fields immediately, but wrapping their byte representation inside the
ScalarArray[T]
class instead. This class acts like a list. That is, you can calllen(a)
,a[i]
, andlist(a)
for any ScalarArraya
, and only at this point we actually deserialize (which is still very slow for big arrays).On the other hand, when using numpy you can also call
np.asarray(a)
for any ScalarArraya
to turn it into a numpy array in no time. Conversely, any numpy arrayb
can be turned into aScalarArray
by callingScalarArray.from_numpy(b)
to be passed to abetterproto
dataclass field (instead of a list) for faster serialization speed.I tried to be as non-breaking as possible. That is, you can use lists everywhere you used them before. However, it was necessary to generate
Sequence[T]
type hints whereList[T]
hints were generated before. Also note that ScalarArray is an immutable data structure. So you might not be able to use.append()
or.insert()
on repeated fields as before (although it should be possible to makeScalarArray
mutable if really needed).What do you think about this approach?