I've been considering adopting the gob package. I haven't used it before, so I only know what's in the docs -- and all of your claims are surprising to me. Could you share more information?

How is it possible that they were getting malformed input? This was happening in go-to-go communication, or was there some kind of cross-language interop?

Any idea why the performance was so much slower than JSON in your case? The technique described in the OP would seem to make that impossible.

Do you think it's possible the database column type or collation was somehow affecting the gob?