Protoc is written in C++ and is quite large, while at the time I was writing Go and had 8 years less experience. It was easier to write and test a small but per

Protoc is written in C++ and is quite large, while at the time I was writing Go and had 8 years less experience. It was easier to write and test a small but perfectly functional recursive descent parser by myself than to try to tackle: - learning a new language - learning a new codebase - modifying that codebase - distributing a that modified fork of a project in c++ alongside what I was building in Go It was much easier in my case to build it as a small part of the tool I was already building and move on with my life.