In the end, [after evaluation](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c2123cKuYsBDpIon9FFdctWTUIMFweSjgwG7r8l3818/edit), the decision was to move forward with a Rust implementation.
This offered performance benefits that were too large to leave on the table, as well as opportunities to tune to our specific needs.

## Configuration protocol

# disable_pgv: disables protoc-gen-validation. This is not used buts adds many MB to Envoy protos
# not set vtprotobuf: this adds some performance improvement, but at a binary cost increase that is not worth it for the agent
AGENT_TAGS=agent,disable_pgv
# disable_pgv: disables protoc-gen-validation. This is not used buts adds many MB to Envoy protos

            desc: "don't use the protojson package directly; use util/protomarshal instead"
          - pkg: gomodules.xyz/jsonpatch/v3
            desc: "don't use v3; v2 is orders of magnitude higher performance"
          - pkg: k8s.io/apimachinery/pkg/util/sets
            desc: "use istio.io/istio/pkg/util/sets"
          - pkg: k8s.io/utils/env
            desc: "use istio.io/istio/pkg/env"