protobuf-grammar VS buf

bufdev brought up some good concerns on that issue:

> This as a community project defeats the purpose of creating a definitive grammar/spec that protocolbuffers/protobuf holds itself to - without that component, having a community-written spec is no improvement over the current situation from what I can see, and in fact could create even more fragmentation and confusion, just my two cents.

It looks like the protobuf team created a repo intended for this (https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf-grammar), perhaps the spec could be contributed there, including a review/blessing from the official team.

> Open-sourcing protobuf was most likely not a big cost, and it had benefits for Google (otherwise it would not have been rational to open source it).

Nah honestly it was more like I said "Hey I want to open source this!" and other engineers said "Yeah that sounds awesome!" so I did. That was Google in ~2007, you could basically do whatever you wanted and as long as it was vaguely plausibly useful management said "sure".

I'm honestly not sure the company had any idea what they should do with OSS protobuf, at least for many years. Management never really gave me any credit for releasing it and gently pressured me to find a different project to work on that more directly aligned with company goals, which I eventually did.

Still not clear if they even know today. They seem more serious about it today but at the same time it's still clear that they mostly don't care about external users, so much so that startups like https://buf.build have to come in and build the actual products around Protobuf that Google never delivered publicly (but has internally). Of course, companies are not hive minds -- there are clearly people at Google who want to make Protobuf a great product, but I don't think management sees it as strategically interesting.

> If protobuf was not open source, something like Cap'n Proto may take its place, and that's not good for Google.

Honestly I don't know if Google cares. Cap'n Proto hasn't caught on much because frankly I don't care to make it a product, I maintain it for my own use (primarily in the Cloudflare Workers runtime, my day job). But if that changed and Cap'n Proto got really good and people ditched Protobuf for it, would it really affect Google? I kind of don't think it would. (Just like I'm not sure it would benefit me that much, which is why I don't make this my job.)

Certainly the strategy around open sourcing something like Protobuf vs. something like Chromium or Android is entirely different. Sundar probably doesn't even know what Protobuf is TBH.

(Disclosure: I wrote and open sourced proto2, created Cap'n Proto, and have a small investment in Buf.)

The Buf CLI is a versatile tool designed for handling Protocol Buffers (Protobuf), a method of serializing structured data. It offers several key features, including managing Protobuf assets through the Buf Schema Registry (BSR), providing a linter to enforce optimal API design and structure, and a breaking change detector to maintain compatibility either in source code or at the wire level. Additionally, the Buf CLI includes a generator that activates plugins based on user-defined templates and a formatter to standardize the formatting of Protobuf files according to industry norms. It also integrates seamlessly with the Buf Schema Registry, supporting comprehensive dependency management.

We'll use the Buf CLI as an alternative to protoc so that we can save our generation configuration as YAML. Buf is compatible with protoc plugins.

Not so much anymore! Take a look at buf.build, it makes the whole thing notoriously easy :)

In my opinion it's a good idea, it's the architecture we use at work, and it works well for us. The main limitation to be aware of is that many PaaS don't support gRPC traffic (because of the proxies used). For example, DigitalOcean App Platform or Heroku if I remember correctly. If the way you want to host your backend is OK with HTTP/2 and gRPC traffic, then it's not a limitation. One way around this limitation is to use the gRPC-Web protocol, or the Connect protocol (https://connect.build/). Unfortunately, Dart's gRPC client does not support the gRPC-Web protocol outside the web platform. So for a mobile application, it's not usable at the moment. (If this PR were accepted, it would solve the issue: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-dart/pull/557.) As for Connect, no client is currently offered by Buf for Dart. Don't hesitate if you want to know more. That said, I'd advise you to use the Connect implementation for Go to implement your backend. Connect will enable your server to speak all three protocols (gRPC, gRPC-Web and Connect), which is very useful in the long term. What's more, the code is cleaner, and you benefit from official support for observability with OpenTelemetry. If you don't know Buf (the creators of Connect),I suggest you visit their website: https://buf.build/. :-) Good luck!

As mentioned in the intro, we are going to use Buf and Connect as our tools. We’ll start by installing the dependencies.

gRPC itself is quite nice, especially with buf which makes generating Go code much easier. The rest of the code was in a bad state. Unmaintained router packages, repository pattern without any actual benefit or a repository pattern.

The second big difference is that we now have auto-generated client and server stubs. For this task, I chose to use buf and the protobuf-ts plugin in order to generate idiomatic Typescript classes and objects. Not only do these classes describe the types we'll use in the server and client, but also includes the actual gRPC implementations used to serialize and send messages back and forth across the wire.

Our team has been using Buf (https://buf.build) recently, and they have a nice solution for schema dependency management.