Protocol Buffers (protobuf)

“Sloppy open-domain protobuf field presence, enum values, whatever are illusory extension points.”

“The role MCP, OpenAPI, and JSON schema fill all would be a million times simpler if they were based on protobuf”

“an advantage of protobuf is that proto files are hand-writeable, and therefore having an LSP for that could be useful”

“Protobuf simply encode things way more efficient that JSON can define a single object.”

“being able to avoid tests between different systems who have different versions of the schema is a core goal of protobuf”

“The protobuf language is not great, but it's about the right balance between too expressive and too restricting.”

“When you have probabilistic models generating code, strict contracts become more critical, not less.”

“If you have a tiny bit of doubt, use a binary alternative that supports it”

“It’s actually not well designed for small requests, and doesn’t even deal with versioning all that well.”

“Protobuf isn't self-documenting, so if you don't have the schema files, you can't interpret the messages”

“it's already demonstrated its ability to ship extremely reliable software with multi-decade lifespans”

“For performance critical data you can also use something like protobuf, but it would be a huge pain to handle everything that way.”

“protobuf has compatibility built in and you do not need to write anything to support outdated clients”

“those libraries will easily and efficiently do the work just as well, probably better”

“I think the Protobuf language (which Skir is heavily influenced by) has some flaws in its core design, e.g. the enum/oneof mess”

“I like Protobuf much better because I think using field numbers for field identity”

“Forward and backward compatibility are one of the wonderful things about protobufs.”

“LLMs already are very familiar with it, there are 100s of protoc plugin to generate code from it”

“how neat and well-designed the wireformat is, in terms of backward/forward compatibility”

“Other systems like CORBA or Protocol Buffers missed some of the components or did not have a well-defined standard”

“protobuf has accumulated enough problems that every large scale application will eventually run into a footgun or two”

“I don't see Protobuf going away, because in non-performance critical cases, it is more ergonomic across the different bindings”

“But it's not, so the question should be why not use it, unless you are doing browser stuff.”

“Protobuf does something important that copying memory cannot do: a protocol that can be changed separately on either end”

“easy to work with, great size (esp compressed), random access, close-to-optimal parsing, extensible”

“Having a way to describe your whole API and generate bindings is a godsend.”

“Protobuf is fantastic because it separates the definition from the language.”

“In most languages protobuf is eaiser because it generates the boilerplate.”

“allows to generate easy to use code for parsing defined data and services for many languages and is one of the faster and less bandwidth wasting options”

“Forwards and backwards compatibility is well-specified across clients in all languages.”

“it is extremely easy to make a non-breaking change to the communication channel”

“This is one of the core strengths of protobuf. Non-destructive protobuf changes, such as adding new API methods or new fields, do not require clients to update.”

“the en/de-coding speed is more important than the packet size in many situations”

“it's slightly annoying that both ends have to agree on how to serialize rather than protobuf itself doing it”

“why spend an extra 15 mins on protobuf every other day, when you can put off the 3-month JSON-revisiting project forever?”

“JSON allowing you to shoot yourself in the foot will take more time and effort to fix when it's corrupting data in prod”

“One of the best parts of Protobuf is that there's a fully compatible JSON serialization and deserialization spec”

“protobuf, generally speaking, falls in the cleverness part, and certainly into the complexity part”

“I think the strict schema of Protobuf might be one of the major improvements”

“the generated code for protobuf serialization (which I have read) is pretty readable”