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Yeah, I agree with pretty much everything you've written here. > 1. The JSON mapping (jsonpb.go) is clumsy at best The best thing for optional fields in jsonp

Yeah, I agree with pretty much everything you've written here. > 1. The JSON mapping (jsonpb.go) is clumsy at best The best thing for optional fields in jsonpb is to use the protobuf wrapper types [1]. They have special support in jsonpb to serialize and deserialize as you would expect, without the indirection. But the Go structs you get on the other end are a little weird, so its a tradeoff. > 2. The Go code generator usually produces highly unidiomatic Go. Yeah, using the generated structs as the main domain types in your code can be up-and-down. I agree that gogoprotobuf can help, but it's rough. We definitely use Getter methods on generated structs quite a bit for stuff like oneofs. > 3. Proto3 has very limited support for expressing "free-form" data. There's always `repeated byte` :) It sounds like a joke, but we've used it in some spots where the input is totally schema-less. The Any type is also designed for this sort of thing. Still clumsy, though. [1] https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/src/google/protobuf/wrappers.proto https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/src/google/pr...

euyyn 9y ago
3. Also google.protobuf.Struct
mappu 9y ago
> > 2. The Go code generator usually produces highly unidiomatic Go. > using the generated structs as the main domain types in your code can be up-and-down At $DAYJOB we solve this by doing code generation outward from our domain types. The RPC layer is idiomatic Go because that's what we began with. Some go/token and regexes take our structs and produce a server-side router implementation for net/http (endpoints from magic comments), some client-side libraries for Go / C++ (Qt) / PHP / JS, and documentation in markdown. Our system is in a pretty reusable state, but nobody has the free cycles to open it. If Twirp had been available 24mo ago our project might have been different.

euyyn 9y ago

3. Also google.protobuf.Struct

mappu 9y ago

> > 2. The Go code generator usually produces highly unidiomatic Go. > using the generated structs as the main domain types in your code can be up-and-down At $DAYJOB we solve this by doing code generation outward from our domain types. The RPC layer is idiomatic Go because that's what we began with. Some go/token and regexes take our structs and produce a server-side router implementation for net/http (endpoints from magic comments), some client-side libraries for Go / C++ (Qt) / PHP / JS, and documentation in markdown. Our system is in a pretty reusable state, but nobody has the free cycles to open it. If Twirp had been available 24mo ago our project might have been different.