Good to know about the 0x00 trick. My point about metadata is that if protobufs had even a small amount of self description in them, the middlemen who weren't

Good to know about the 0x00 trick. My point about metadata is that if protobufs had even a small amount of self description in them, the middlemen who weren't being updated could all have been found automatically and the version skew issue would have been much less of an issue. Like how Dapper can follow RPCs around, but for data and running binaries. Google doesn't do that because for its specific domain it needs a very tight encoding, amongst other reasons (and the legacy issues). It could have fixed the validating-but-not-updated-middleman issue in other ways, but instead it made the schema type system less rigorous vs more rigorous. That seems the wrong direction.