Sorry for the snark. This issue is a sore spot for me because so many people have reported it without having actually been affected by it, and because they tend

Sorry for the snark. This issue is a sore spot for me because so many people have reported it without having actually been affected by it, and because they tend to assume the designers were stupidly unaware of the issue, rather than that the issue is actually rather hard to solve in a satisfying way. However, if you actually were affected by it, then you are right to be annoyed by it. The particular case where someone developed a protocol mostly in one language and then later on started targeting a new language is indeed a case that I do worry about. The idea of language-specific annotations defining language-specific renames was designed for that use case. I haven't worked on Protobuf in almost a decade, but Cap'n Proto does address this issue as I said -- without making everyone's code horribly ugly.