System and competitive boundary
Audit an explicitly compatible same-process buffer ownership boundary. A borrowed view may avoid an eligible copy only while byte-for-byte identity, lifetime safety and format compatibility are satisfied; fall back to copying when the contract is uncertain.
Optimized comparator: Optimized same-process allocate-copy / borrowed-buffer path, plus real gRPC or Protobuf transfer if present; exact-byte checks, CPU, p99 and p99.9.
Scoped existing numbers: Mac2 R3: median 367.38 ns for a local 1-KiB borrowed-buffer audit versus 571.04 ns paired allocate-copy reference (1.55×), 5 × 200,000 operations. Separate Linux ~1.35× came from a different protocol. Neither is network zero-copy.
Production SLA, real-customer ROI and incremental advantage over the buyer's optimized implementation remain separate acceptance gates.