Oh, that's encoding.

I agree encoding can be made many times faster by just not allocating a new buffer on every iteration. The same effect happens in my encoder. If I reuse a buffer it gets many times faster. I didn't think about this before because I was only thinking about decoding and encoding was an afterthought because it's not too performance critical.

But currently for decoding my codec beats gob by far -- unless again I'm missing something.