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I think the emotional response is probably due to the fact that Protocol buffers is often forced upon teams, due to the desire for a common standard and the mar
by grumpyprole 4y ago
I think the emotional response is probably due to the fact that Protocol buffers is often forced upon teams, due to the desire for a common standard and the marketing power that Google have. But the author raises many valid issues and you would be wrong to dismiss them completely. The first version of Protocol buffers, IIRC, didn't even support static offsets and extracting a field without deserialising the entire message. So it was arguably both inelegant and inefficient. I was never impressed myself personally and have seen quite a few better closed-source wire formats inside various corporates.
- paxys 4y agoYes you can have many valid issues with Protocol buffers. "Written by amateurs" is not one of them, and that is the specific one I was dismissing. Reading through the rest of the post though, it is pretty clear that it is a case of trying to use what is a standard for data transfer over the network to describe your entire application's object model. It isn't the right tool for the job, and doesn't have to be. If it is being forced on you then, well, that's a complaint for your management, not the technology itself.
- bragr 4y ago>I think the emotional response is probably due to the fact that Protocol buffers is often forced upon teams True, but a lack of self awareness is never a good look.
- hot_gril 4y agoIt's also a really bold claim that he doesn't back up, so I don't trust the rest. It's not like he dug around and found out that the main protobuf author was actually some hack who forced something bad on the rest of the company then bailed. That would be Google Plus.