4 ms·

Why is that absurd? Products used by billions of people may just as well not have serious requirements. I beg not to debate semantics, indeed my own fault, but

Why is that absurd? Products used by billions of people may just as well not have serious requirements. I beg not to debate semantics, indeed my own fault, but in the world of network software requirements can start to get very serious, straight through to userspace protocol stacks on DMA'ed device buffers. Would you go through all of the effort to rig an application with userspace networking only to return its results inside an `std::string` -- one of the few std containers where one can't even control the allocator if they wanted to? That's absurd, if anything.

xyzzyz 6y ago
> but in the world of network software requirements can start to get very serious, straight through to userspace protocol stacks on DMA'ed device buffers. Google does all of that when it makes sense, and yet uses it to push protobufs. That’s the entire point: you are calling it absurd and non-serious, but this only shifts my opinion on you, not on Google.
kentonv 6y ago
If you are arguing that there exist use cases for which Protobuf is ill-suited, then fine, I obviously agree. But you seem to be arguing that Protobuf is bad because it is not well suited to certain use cases, dismissing all other use cases as "non-serious". That is offensive.
- jasonzemos 6y ago
  I asked you not to argue semantics, but you're doing it anyway. I didn't respond here to argue protobufs actually is bad, since all software is suited to something for somebody somewhere. In fact, I can just do that now: Protobufs is bad. You seem to agree, because you haven't even advocated for it -- just flatbuffers and Cap'n Proto and the phonebook of alternatives. Listen, I don't care who you've worked for or what you've done. As a scientist and engineer I'm totally ready and able to entertain critiques of my prior works without being offended. I'm offended that this is the quality of your participation here.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dekhn 6y ago
    This is a really unprofessional and unreasonable approach (and I can see you're being downvoted for it). Since you say you're a scientist and engineer, can you share your prior work so we can evaluate it?

xyzzyz 6y ago

> but in the world of network software requirements can start to get very serious, straight through to userspace protocol stacks on DMA'ed device buffers. Google does all of that when it makes sense, and yet uses it to push protobufs. That’s the entire point: you are calling it absurd and non-serious, but this only shifts my opinion on you, not on Google.

kentonv 6y ago

If you are arguing that there exist use cases for which Protobuf is ill-suited, then fine, I obviously agree. But you seem to be arguing that Protobuf is bad because it is not well suited to certain use cases, dismissing all other use cases as "non-serious". That is offensive.

jasonzemos 6y ago
I asked you not to argue semantics, but you're doing it anyway. I didn't respond here to argue protobufs actually is bad, since all software is suited to something for somebody somewhere. In fact, I can just do that now: Protobufs is bad. You seem to agree, because you haven't even advocated for it -- just flatbuffers and Cap'n Proto and the phonebook of alternatives. Listen, I don't care who you've worked for or what you've done. As a scientist and engineer I'm totally ready and able to entertain critiques of my prior works without being offended. I'm offended that this is the quality of your participation here.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dekhn 6y ago
  This is a really unprofessional and unreasonable approach (and I can see you're being downvoted for it). Since you say you're a scientist and engineer, can you share your prior work so we can evaluate it?