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A big design goal of Protobuf was long-term evolvability of message definitions with backward and forward compatibility. How rich is ASN.1 in that aspect?
by floatboth 5y ago
A big design goal of Protobuf was long-term evolvability of message definitions with backward and forward compatibility. How rich is ASN.1 in that aspect?
- p_l 5y agoProtobuf has known issues with backward/forward compatibility that require special attention, ASN.1 makes it IMHO remarkably easier (also consider kerberos which uses ASN.1, defining each extensible piece of data with extra tag declaring whether it must be parsed or can be ignored and passed on)
- ithkuil 5y agoCan you point us to which well known backward compatibility issues protobuf has?
- rixed 5y agoThis is indeed important for a serialization format to permit extensions, and ASN1 types can accordingly be extended in a backward compatible way (for instance, enumerations can be said to also accept other constructors to be defined in the future).