I go over it in a bit more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21621592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21621592 But in short, Protobuf is i

I go over it in a bit more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21621592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21621592 But in short, Protobuf is inherently a language of its own. Like JSON or etc. But it's feature rich enough that it can cause a fair number of incompatibilities between a language's preferred style or usage of features. Where the incompatibility shows up depends on the language. I found it to be very different between Rust and Go, for example.