I'm using protobufs for an embedded product, and I think they're awesome. Not the solution to everything - certainly - but definitely a highly useful tool for

I'm using protobufs for an embedded product, and I think they're awesome. Not the solution to everything - certainly - but definitely a highly useful tool for the right circumstances. In my case, I have a single .proto file that serves as the input to two software systems: an embedded OS running on ESP8266 hardware, and the web interface served up by that OS to edit OS-specific features/variables/etc. So, I define in one file, my types that I want shared both with the embedded OS, and with the web interface. On compile, both systems get their relevant generated code, and both systems are therefore able to communicate easily with each other. The user can use the embedded OS to change values coded in the protobuf, and the web interface that the system serves up immediately knows about the change. The web interface, by the way, generates the UI based on the protobuf declarations - meaning that adding a new var to the project is a simple matter of editing the .proto file, and doing a full clean build. Very, very nice: one change, multiple systems updated, and it produces an auto-generated UI for the new vars. This kind of interoperability is very key - I'm sure there are alternative ways of doing this, but I can't think of anything as smooth and easy to integrate as protobufs have been .. maybe if we'd put a Lua VM in the mix somewhere, this'd be better, but .. protobufs are pretty tight.