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IIRC (I could be wrong on this one) protobuf isn't really a specification, it's a single implementation, and is quite hard to reimplement. Here's a short compa

• morelisp 5y ago
  Regarding the wire format specifically, it's not fully formalized but there's dozen implementations, not all of them from Google. You could hack together a basic serde for a particular language in an afternoon, in some respects much more easily than you could JSON. Most of the engineering work is in the schema compilers.
  • heavenlyblue 5y ago
    But in order to semantically read protocol buffer files one needs to compile the schema files…
    • morelisp 5y ago
      The degree you "need" to support the full schema format depends entirely on the language you're using. In Go you only need the annotated structures, or in Java you only need a mapping between field number and name, and the languages' own reflection capabilities can handle the rest. Yes, strings, bytes, and substructures all appear in the same in the wire format. Just like strings, bytes, and dates all appear the same in JSON. If you're trying to write a generic protobuf viewer like wodenokoto suggests, you can make reasonable assumptions about the contents 99% of the time based on the data, and show the user multiple options if you're not sure. There are already lots of tools that do this, but none very well integrated into mainstream development workflows.