honeybuf VS protoc-gen-validate

The same reason along with the fact that you had to generate code, as well as usually needing to convert it to a class afterward was the reason I wrote my owner typescript-native binary serializer[0] (mostly based on C-FFI for compatibility) a few years ago.

[0]: https://github.com/i404788/honeybuf

My understanding is that the powers that be within Google have decided that validating messages is outside the scope of schemas and serialization. protoc-gen-validate provides a portable way to perform validation: https://github.com/bufbuild/protoc-gen-validate

The problem with required fields is it kicks the can down the road when you want to deprecate a field. Keeping everything optional is much, much better for everyone in the long run.

I built a (go) very rough draft to support 3.1 + a json pointer pkg to support a refactor that was in progress before I bailed on the idea. The amount of effort to get a conventional API was dwarfing that of grpc, especially with protoc-gen-validate.

Yes, I am currently using this. I prefer something like this https://github.com/envoyproxy/protoc-gen-validate

We've been using Rust with protobuf, but had to write lots of conversions from protobuf struct to actual DTO, since prost generates Options for nested types, and does not really support custom types. So I extended prost with the options that we needed. I might aim to also support protoc-gen-validate.