goprotobuf VS Protobuf

Now let’s take a look at the source code of the protoc-gen-go plugin:

Wait, you say, in Go you can embed a struct with default method implementations to "inherit" them in your composed struct... sure, except any methods called by those methods are early-bound in the original struct, completely ignoring your wrapper, so the best you can do is "not implemented" rather than actually implement something. It is at least a way to prevent semver-major breakage, which the gRPC generator uses, but that's about as far as it gets you.

The classic answer is protobufs. You can serialize out to binary format.

Seems like go is pretty middle of the road. I can only guess as to why but it probably has to do with heavy usage of pointers and reflection which are much slower than other implementations. Gogo/protobuf (RIP) solved this performance with code generation, but the the official go protobuf implementation has essentially eschewed it. I do wonder how the benchmark would look using the new vitess proto library for Go (which has many of the benefits of gogo but with active development and an API built on top of the Google one)

Maybe I'm missing something, but my read of [golang/protobuf#364](https://github.com/golang/protobuf/issues/364) was that the re-organization in protobuf-go v2 was allow for optimizations like gogoprotobuf to be developed without requiring a complete fork. I totally understand that the authors of gogoprotobuf do not have the time to re-architect their library to use these hooks, but best I can figure this generator does not use these hooks either. Instead it defines additional member functions, and wrappers that look for those specialized functions and fallback to the generic ones if not found.

I am thinking about stuff like the [ProtoMethods](https://pkg.go.dev/google.golang.org/[email protected]/reflec...) API.

I wonder why not? Did the authors of the vtprotobuf extension not want to bite off that much work? Is the new API not sufficient to do what they want (thus failing some of the goals expressed in golang/protobuf#364?

In this case try approach with line by line generation. Very much like what protoc-gen-go does for Go code: https://github.com/golang/protobuf/blob/ae97035608a719c7a1c1c41bed0ae0744bdb0c6f/protoc-gen-go/grpc/grpc.go#L142, need to implement this kind of generator yourself.

Something like this: https://github.com/golang/protobuf/blob/master/internal/gengogrpc/grpc.go

For at least 4 years protobuf has had decent support for self-describing messages (very similar to avro) as well as reflection

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

Xgooglers trying to make do on the cheap will just create a Union of all their messages and include the message def in a self-describing message pattern. Super-sensitive network I/O can elide the message def (empty buffer) and any for RecordIO clone well file compression takes care of the definition.

Definitely useful to be able to dig out old defs but protobuf maintainers have surprisingly added useful features so you don’t have to.

Bonus points tho for extracting the protobuf defs that e.g. Apple bakes into their binaries.

gRPC Gateway is a protoc plugin that reads gRPC service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server that translates a RESTful JSON API into gRPC.

To use more recent versions of protoc in future applications, you can download them from the Protobuf repository.

Use the Protobuf CLI protoc and the plugin protoc-gen-tonic.

> didn’t find any standard for separating protobuf messages

The fact that protobufs are not self-delimiting is an endless source of frustration, but I know of 2 standards:

- SerializeDelimited* is part of the protobuf library: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

- Riegeli is "a file format for storing a sequence of string records, typically serialized protocol buffers. It supports dense compression, fast decoding, seeking, detection and optional skipping of data corruption, filtering of proto message fields for even faster decoding, and parallel encoding": https://github.com/google/riegeli

It looks like it is in fact universal. Just glancing at the code here, it looks like the tool searches any arbitrary file for bytes that look like encoded protobuf descriptors, specifically looking for bytes that are plausibly the beginning of a FileDescriptorProto message defined here:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

This takes advantage of the fact that such descriptors are commonly compiled into programs that use protobuf. The descriptors are usually embedded as constant byte arrays. That said, not all protobuf implementations embed the descriptors and those that do often have an option to inhibit such embedding (at the expense of losing some dynamic introspection features).

Not much. You can check the source code in https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf. For example, for serializing a boolean in C#: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/csharp/src/Google.Protobuf/WritingPrimitives.cs#L165. Strings and objects are a bit more complicated, but it is all about turning the data into its byte representation.

One of the key feature of gRPC is protobuf .proto file(nothing but just a contract for me between two communicator code components) This file and protobuff compiler is so mature, then it generates a direct client implementation using protoccompiler. ref