protobuf-conformance VS quick-protobuf

It looks like Protobuf actually has a test suite to ensure compliance with the protocol:

https://github.com/bufbuild/protobuf-conformance

Seems like a good idea for protocols in general to have an official test suite, as a way to address this problem

[quick-protobuf]: https://github.com/tafia/quick-protobuf

I actually went through all projects listed in [1] because I remember this very quirk. It turns out that there are many such libraries that have two variants of encode/decode functions, where the second variant prepends a varint length. In my brief inspection there do exist a few libraries with only the second variant (e.g. Rust quick-protobuf), which is legitimately problematic [2].

But if the project in question was indeed protobuf.js (see loeg's comments), it clearly distinguishes encode/decode vs. encodeDelimited/decodeDelimited. So I believe the project should not be blamed, and the better question would be why so many people chose to add this exact helper. Well, because Google itself also had the same helper [3]! So at this point protobuf should just standardize this simple framing format (with an explicitly different name though), instead of claiming that protobuf has no obligation to define one.

[1] https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/docs/t...

[2] https://github.com/tafia/quick-protobuf/issues/130

[3] https://protobuf.dev/reference/java/api-docs/com/google/prot...

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