> The most common method is to use an array indexed by the field number. I've seen protobufs with hundreds of fields so that's hundreds of nulls as the string "

> The most common method is to use an array indexed by the field number. I've seen protobufs with hundreds of fields so that's hundreds of nulls as the string "null". What you are describing here is known as the "JSPB" wire format. This is a serialization that is only ever used for JavaScript, and only used there because, historically, parsing binary protobufs in JavaScript was too slow. With TypedArray and other JavaScript enhancements, this is changing. Ideally, JSPB wire format would be phased out completely. > The alternative is to have JSON objects with attributes named after the protobufs field name. This isn't without warts either and seems to be less prevelant in my experience. It's about to become a lot more prevalent with proto3, which features first-class JSON support. See: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#json https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#j... Disclaimer: I work on the protobuf team.