4 ms·

I think protobuf might just be a performance art piece, exploring the question of how much complexity it's possible to insert into a simple concept.

• BobbyTables2 3y ago
  Indeed. Having used it and examined the resulting binary formats it uses, I don’t get it. Google makes some nice things, but protobuf isn’t one of them. IIRC (5 yes ago), it was somewhat self describing with respect to struct offsets but had no (data format) versioning or type information. Never understood that design choice, even in mixed endian+architecture environments. Ends up being horribly inefficient for small/one-time instances, and not all that great for client/server use. We were looking at it to get away from C structs and handmade serialization — only to unexpectedly realize that our methods were still better. (We genuinely did not want this outcome!). JSON/yaml were not options for other reasons. Protobuf is the modern realization of “the king has no clothes”.
• bitcharmer 2y ago
  That depends. In low latency environments you will see some protobuf but not as much as you'd think. SBE is quite common with the odd exception of some bespoke serialization protocols with delta compression and such.