Protobuf VS Json.NET

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

This bug and many others related to time: https://github.com/JamesNK/Newtonsoft.Json/issues/862 And they will never get fixes, because the project is kind of dead. Edit: and actually, the creator claim to have made it like this on purpose, so I don't trust it anymore.

There's a related discussion on the GitHub repo:

Nuget is where you'll get 3rd party libraries (such as Newtonsoft.Json for JSON processing)

Common convention (with rare exceptions) is to name your project the same as your assembly name and default namespace. For example, Newtonsoft.Json.csproj makes an assembly called Newtonsoft.Json.dll with the default namespace of Newtonsoft.Json. Inside that project directory (which usually also has the same name), subdirectories would match namespaces nested inside the default, like in that example there is a folder named Serialization which contains classes that are all in the namespace Newtonsoft.Json.Serialization. Classes in this nested namespace can automatically access classes defined in parent namespaces without extra using statements, like how JsonProperty.cs can reference JsonConverter from the Newtonsoft.Json namespace, but it needs a using statement at the top of the file in order to access classes from the sibling namespace Newtonsoft.Json.Utilities

As I said, I'm not familiar with C# but on a quick Google it seems there isn't one idiomatic way to handle JSON in C# - instead a multitude of different libraries/packages for doing so. This seems... ...irritating. json.NET (https://www.newtonsoft.com/json) seems to be one of the best (but again, I don't know C#).

MonoGame abstracts a lot of the rendering work and is easy to use for 2D games (I haven't tested its 3D support so far). It also provides you with a content pipeline plus audio and input handlers. All that's left for you to do is roll your own Entity Component System, physics, and game logic. If you're not interested in writing your own physics, there are libraries out there already. Additionally, if you don't want to get caught up in the details of data serialization, Json.NET is a great package for serializing data in JSON format. That makes it perfect when paired with a map editor such as Tiled, which can export to JSON.

Also file an issue report with Newtonsoft because IMO that should not be happening.