Protobuf

Protocol Buffers (a.k.a., protobuf) are Google’s language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. You can find protobuf’s documentation on the Google Developers site.

• Developed by Google
• Most efficient serialization format compared to JSON and XML
• Language and platform agnostic
• Backward and forward compatibility
• Automatic code generation for multiple languages

To install protobuf, you need two components:

1. Protocol compiler (protoc) - compiles .proto files
2. Protobuf runtime - specific to your programming language

“protobuf” or “protocol buffers” is the name of a serialization format and/or associated tooling.

• protoc: Google’s official implementation of a “.proto” parser and code generator
• .proto: A text-based schema DSL for describing messages in your application

• Microservices communication
• Data storage
• Real-time communication systems
• Mobile applications (due to efficient binary format)

More discussion and insights available on news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32812873

Origin:
References: GitHub, Avro, Schema Evolution
Last Modified: 2021-11-09
Created 2021-11-09