There's an important distinction between the decoding speed of documents and overall throughput.

Wonder what can be done to realistically generate something approximating a real world benchmark to cover the throughput scenario.

What's the project? Seems like a language with a GC is not a good choice, is it?

Essentially a gloried batcher / data transformer consuming from Kafka.

Even with the GC overhead, I will still able to hit my performance goal of 40k msg/sec per AWS c3.4xl.

In a vacuum I would have picked Rust over Go for this. But Go is widely used at my work, whereas I'm the only Rust guy.

How much of a difference you think rust would of made? Have you made something similar?

I've written some high req/sec projects in Rust, but nothing that would be apples-to-apples to that particular Go project.

The memory access patterns are straight-forward enough that the remaining GC could definitely go away. If I had to make a wild, from the hip, and unsubstantiated guess, maybe a 2x to 5x performance multiple. That would include a comparable amount of time spent optimizing and would depend greatly on the quality of the Kafka crates for Rust (which I've never used).