We built mcpzip to be fast, lightweight, and invisible. Here is a detailed breakdown of its performance characteristics -- startup time, search latency, memory footprint, and binary size.

If you use MCP tools with Claude Code, you are probably burning tens of thousands of tokens on tool schemas -- before your conversation even starts. Here is the math, and how mcpzip fixes it.

mcpzip started as a Go project. It worked well -- the Go SDK for MCP was solid, the binary was reasonable, and the codebase was clean. But as we pushed the proxy harder with more servers, more tools, and tighter performance requirements, we hit Go's limits.

So we rewrote the entire thing in Rust. Here is why, and how it went.