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While certainly not as ubiquitous as Protobuf, Cap'n Proto[1] is an extremely excellent alternative worth checking out. The quality of the generated C++ code is

While certainly not as ubiquitous as Protobuf, Cap'n Proto[1] is an extremely excellent alternative worth checking out. The quality of the generated C++ code is enough reason for me to prefer it. [1] https://capnproto.org/ https://capnproto.org/

Eridrus 3y ago
Does protobuf or capnproto have good tooling support out in the world? Proto was very convenient at Google since everything was proto, your debug tools were proto, all your data pipeline tools spoke proto, you had command line utilities for protos, etc, etc. It seems like the rest of the world is on JSON unless they actually need performance, so if you don't get performance, should you use something like a code generator for JSON types like Conjure so that you don't actually have to deal with these binary formats everywhere?
- kentonv 3y ago
  > Does protobuf or capnproto have good tooling support out in the world? Buf (author of the article) has made it their mission to build out that tooling and support for Protobuf. I think they're doing a good job. Cap'n Proto's ecosystem is admittedly weak, since it as yet has no full-time team trying to build this out. (Disclosure: I'm the author of Cap'n Proto and, long ago, Protobuf v2. I'm also a small investor in Buf.)