4 ms·

What makes you say that Protobufs are bad thing? I'm finding the opposite - where you end up with everyone's favourite json parser, not able to handle UTF8 here

by malkia 8y ago

What makes you say that Protobufs are bad thing? I'm finding the opposite - where you end up with everyone's favourite json parser, not able to handle UTF8 here and there, or some handle multi-line json, other handle comments, etc, etc. Also certainly slower, and certainly when you process data back you have to serialize, convert, check, etc. For me protobuf+grpc gives you enough building block, not to shoot yourself in the foot - but rather start from something ready. You get on top of that census metrics, bi-directional communication, and yes there are limitations - it's HTTP2 only (right? correct me if I'm wrong), but maybe that's what you need. Instead, I see folks - going back to sock(), using them directly, and then reinventing wheels of wheels of wheels. Then discovery comes - how do I discover what's there and there? I've got used to the nice (forgot the itnernal name) where I can ask the "grpc" server (well stubby, whatever it was called) give me your endpoints - and it gives me the endppoints. Then I can talk to it. Yes, it complicates build systems (need to generate damn protos), but you can also do custom protobuf generator plugins that generate custom tailored access, where you get performance gains, sacrificing features you don't need, like project perfetto - https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/perfetto/+/master/tools/proto_to_cpp/proto_to_cpp.cc https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/perfetto/... Here: ProtoZero - https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/perfetto/+/HEAD/docs/protozero.md https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/perfetto/... Possibly old, there might be newer version, but still: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bxlk9F79JZDk4wRXZQ9WQ5DP5TdKeQDMPy5jh3ht9fU/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bxlk9F79JZDk4wRXZQ9WQ5DP...

AstralStorm 8y ago
It doesn't complicate just build systems, because of the weaknesses of it's type system and code generation it requires wrappers. Those get desynced and take maintenance. This is the main point where the whole reason to use Protobuf falls apart - it doesn't work well enough to skip manual parsing. And if you do manual parsing you might well go all the way in and use JSON with a schema and a reasonable library to handle these. You gain very little convenience wise and only a bunch of line bytes at best. Which typically does not matter for use cases of Protobuf that are not Google sized.
- malkia 8y ago
  With certain build systems, this is a solved problem, or at least solved well, but it's a buy-in, so no great solution for MSBuild (for example), but works well in bazel.

by malkia 8y ago

AstralStorm 8y ago

It doesn't complicate just build systems, because of the weaknesses of it's type system and code generation it requires wrappers. Those get desynced and take maintenance. This is the main point where the whole reason to use Protobuf falls apart - it doesn't work well enough to skip manual parsing. And if you do manual parsing you might well go all the way in and use JSON with a schema and a reasonable library to handle these. You gain very little convenience wise and only a bunch of line bytes at best. Which typically does not matter for use cases of Protobuf that are not Google sized.

malkia 8y ago
With certain build systems, this is a solved problem, or at least solved well, but it's a buy-in, so no great solution for MSBuild (for example), but works well in bazel.