This is excellent: an in-depth description showing how the Go internals make writing fast interpreters difficult, by someone who is far more determined than I ever was to make it fast anyway.

I’ve assumed that writing fast interpreters wasn’t a use case the Go team cared much about, but if it makes protobuf parsing faster, maybe it will get some attention, and some of these low-level tricks will no longer be necessary?

> and some of these low-level tricks will no longer be necessary?

Don't count on it. This language is Golang.