re: protobufs > It requires the program doing data parsing work to have the generated library as well. This would generally cause problem when schema modified.

re: protobufs > It requires the program doing data parsing work to have the generated library as well. This would generally cause problem when schema modified. That's not the case, and is the exact reason why you need to specify tag numbers in protos - so that you can make your schema forward and backward compatible when decoding/encoding from/to the wire format.