Eh, I struggle to say that pb has a "wire" format. A binary encoding sure. To me wire format implies framing etc, enough stuff to actually get it across a stre

Eh, I struggle to say that pb has a "wire" format. A binary encoding sure. To me wire format implies framing etc, enough stuff to actually get it across a stream in a reasonable way. For pb this usually means some sort of length delimited framing you come up with yourself. Similarily pb doesn't have a canonical file format for multiple encoded buffers. For these reasons I rarely use pb as an interchange format, it's great for internal stuff and good if you want to do your own framing or file format but if you want to store and eventually process things with other things then you are better off with stuff like Avro which does define things like the Object Container Format.