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

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”.