gomega VS Protobuf

Gomega: is a test assertion library, a vital dependency on Ginkgo.

Gomega is a Go library that allows you to make assertions. In our example, we check if what we got is null, not null, or equal to an exact value, but the gomega library is much richer than that.

Depends on the API and how much testing you need. You want to test your code, not the API's availability or correctness.

But it can be as easy as using a fake http library and mocking the responses, or using a httptest server: https://onsi.github.io/gomega/#ghttp-testing-http-clients

If the API is complicated and you have to write your own fake server, that might not make sense for small projects.

If we do the count, we gather that subtest appear to solve five out of the six problems we identified with the assert library. At this point though, it's important to note that at the time when the assert package was designed, the sub-test feature in Go did not yet exist. Therefore it would have been impossible for that library to embed it into it's design. This is also true for when Gomega and Ginko where designed. If these test frameworks where created now, then most likely some parts of their design would have been done differently. What I am trying to say is that with even the slightest change in the Go language and standard library, completely new ways of designing programs become possible. Especially for new packages without any legacy use-cases to consider. And this brings us to generics.

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