3 ms·

Is that a problem with ProtoBufs or Java?

• hodgesrm 8y ago
  Java only allows one version of any class within a single class loader. That's just how it works. So the problem was at the very least a limitation of the protobufs Java implementation. Speaking of which, the generated code was incredibly convoluted with what seemed like tangled dependencies on the underlying protobufs library. I used to dread debugging it--sometimes I would have to go into it to figure out what the upper layers were doing wrong. Luckily it did not happen very often. And I don't recall ever hitting a bug in protobufs itself for all that the code was virtually unreadable.
• ionforce 8y ago
  I'm an outsider, but maybe it's a problem of their interaction? Most likely, the vast majority of Protobuf use is with code generated to a single, canonical location (which leads to the problem described above). But hypothetically, it would be possible for code to generate and refer to two different versions. That doesn't sound impossible. Maybe just improbably given the way things are typically set up.