The "Lightweight Protocol Buffer Library" provides fast encoding and decoding of Google Protocol Buffers in C and Python.

Some distinctive things about lwpb:

• lwpb does not require a codegen step.

• lwpb does not force OO on the programmer. Encoding and decoding works with dicts in Python, and plain old structures in C.

• lwpb is fast and small. The C library is 31kb stripped. The Python module is mostly written in C and performs well in benchmarks.

• lwpb does not depend on Google's C++ API or anything outside the Python standard libraries.

• lwpb supports most features of the protocol buffer serialization format -- probably, all the ones you care about. :)

Quick Python synopsis:

from lwpb.codec import MessageCodec

codec = MessageCodec( pb2file='person.pb2', typename='example.Person' )
serialized = codec.encode( { 'name': 'John Doe', 'id': 1234  } )
deserialized = codec.decode( serialized )

print deserialized

This expects a compiled .proto file you can generate with:

protoc person.proto -o person.pb2

To build the Python module, first compile the C library (see below), then:

cd python
./build_inplace
python setup.py test
python setup.py build
python setup.py install

For Debian and Ubuntu users:

cd python
debian/rules binary
dpkg -i ../*.deb

The C library was originally released by Simon Kallweit. More documentation on the C API can be found here: https://code.google.com/p/lwpb/

To compile:

make

To test it:

make check

From a recent benchmark which included the lwpb Python module (lower times are better):

JSON
3.56521892548

SimpleJSON 
0.727998971939

Protocol Buffer (fast)
0.38397192955

Protocol Buffer (standard)
4.86640501022

Protocol Buffer (lwpb)
0.323328971863

cPickle
0.811990976334

Supported types:

• INT32
• UINT32
• INT64
• UINT64
• FIXED32
• FIXED64
• SFIXED32
• SFIXED64
• DOUBLE
• FLOAT
• BOOL
• STRING
• MESSAGE
• BYTES
• ENUM

That is to say, everything but GROUP, which Google has deprecated.

Supported options:

• packed repeated fields

Supported by the C library, but not by the Python library:

• services
• RPC

Not supported:

• extensions