Have you seen protobuf.js? I've dug quite deep into its generated code and have not seen any runtime magic. It's just directly working with the protobuf wire fo

Have you seen protobuf.js? I've dug quite deep into its generated code and have not seen any runtime magic. It's just directly working with the protobuf wire format and transferring the data to/from fields with very explicit code. I can't speak for Google's official implementation though.