In my experience, protobuf has a minimum project complexity threshold before it starts to make sense. Yes, if both sides of your interchange are systems which

In my experience, protobuf has a minimum project complexity threshold before it starts to make sense. Yes, if both sides of your interchange are systems which have build infra setup, it provides a better experience. But if you need to access data from outside of your usual projects, or from shell, or from random data analysis notebooks, It becomes a major pain. Recent example: we’ve had an orchestrator script which was written in “python with stdlib only” - no build step, download an archive, extract and run. This script had to talk to third-party program which would export protobuf only. This was a major pain as yon can imagine.