Just reading that ProtoBuf isn’t just for messaging but can be used to store data to a file. Based on this I’m thinking of making all my chat logs from the Twitch bot Imma write this way so that when we have trillions of messages they will parse in the fastest way possible for searchability and pseudo-database behavior. I’m not adding a fucking database dependency. That’s for sure. Besides, databases for this sort of thing are way overkill since appending to a file in Linux/UNIX is the fastest possible IO. It is a disk write, but the memory caching can be buffered in the app if needed and writes made at the maximum possible interval. We would only potentially lose the block size of messages if the application crashed.