protoargs VS Protobuf

Go implementation page (how to use in golang) https://github.com/ashlander/protoargs/tree/AZ_golang/doc/go

More info on how that will look like - https://github.com/ashlander/protoargs May be that would be of interest for you too

Documentation https://github.com/ashlander/protoargs/tree/AZ_rust

Protoargs script uses arguments parser which is generated by itself. This is the configuration for protoargs script and code generated arguments parser.

That's how protoargs project appeared. Which converts special protobuf configuration into a ready-to-use arguments parser. And I do use it a lot in my projects. The best example was to use it in multiple commands CLI , e.g. you can implement your own "git init/clone/commit/..." easily. And protobuf allows preserving compatibility between versions. Recently I have used it inside gamedev project with a potentially huge number of commands, and now it takes me 5-10 min for new command to be added, and ~0 min to add new arguments to existing command and start using them in the code.

I have added the project to github, so anyone could use it, called protoargs . It supports C++ and Python, but there are plans to add more programming languages, so to make arguments parsing you would need only learn how to create a configuration. When I will have enough karma points I would make a post in the opensource subreddit.

It's because they changed the versioning format: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases?page=5

But I suppose old version still receive bugfixes.

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.