Are they sure it's because Rust? Perhaps if they rewrite Protobuf in Rust it will be as slow as the current implementation.

They changed the persistence system completely. Looks like from a generic solution to something specific to what they're carrying across the wire.

They could have done it in Lua and it would have been 3x faster.

If they made the headline something on the line of "replacing protobuf with a native, optimized implementation" would not get the same attention as putting rust in the title to attract the everything-in-rust-is-better crowd.

It's devbait, not many of us can resist bikeshedding about the title which obviously doesn't accurately reflect the article contents. And the article contents are self-aware enough to admit this to itself too, yet the title remains.

I was equally confused by the headline.

I wonder if it's just poorly worded and they meant to say something like "Replacing Protobuf with some native calls [in Rust]".

The title would suggest that it was already written in Rust; that it was the rewrite in Go that brought five times faster.

Correct, this has very little to do with Rust. But it wouldn't have made the front page without it.

Yes you are absolutely right. The article even outright admits that Rust had nothing to do with it. From the article:

> Protobuf is fast, but not using Protobuf is faster.

The blog post reads like an unserious attempt to repeat a Rust meme.