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> When I was last doing this stuff, upwards of 80% of our time was being spent essentially just JSON.parse()'ing, and we were looking to move to protobufs to av

> When I was last doing this stuff, upwards of 80% of our time was being spent essentially just JSON.parse()'ing, and we were looking to move to protobufs to avoid that. It's only tangentially related to your question, but I can't help but ask this question: why people use JSON instead of protobufs at all? I'm mostly a client-side developer, and most of my server-side experience is in hobby projects; still, I always used protobufs and loved it. They never damaged my feature velocity, apart from an hour to set up the build system in the beginning, and type safety helped me quite a few times when I forgot to sync changes in protocol on client and server side. Are there some secret advantages of going with json that I don't see because of limited experience?

kevstev 7y ago
JSON existed before protobufs is really it. When I left the node world 3 years ago, protobufs were the new hot thing. Any new project should start with them over JSON imho. There is some friction to them though, and I think a lot of it is that most tutorials and beginner books like to keep things as simple as possible, and people start their little project, it gets traction, and then they figure out they need protobufs but now its hard to introduce. In most projects, even today, it seems that its the version 2.0 that gets protobufs, v1.0 keeps JSON for simplicity, unless you have a bunch of seasoned devs involved.
deleted 7y ago
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