Protobuf
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Protobuf | jk | |
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171 | 9 | |
63,263 | 398 | |
0.9% | 0.0% | |
10.0 | 0.0 | |
6 days ago | about 1 year ago | |
C++ | Go | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | Apache License 2.0 |
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Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Protobuf
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Reverse Engineering Protobuf Definitions from Compiled Binaries
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.
- Show HN: AuthWin – Authenticator App for Windows
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Create Production-Ready SDKs With gRPC Gateway
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.
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Create Production-Ready SDKs with Goa
To use more recent versions of protoc in future applications, you can download them from the Protobuf repository.
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Roll your own auth with Rust and Protobuf
Use the Protobuf CLI protoc and the plugin protoc-gen-tonic.
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Add extra stuff to a “standard” encoding? Sure, why not
> 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
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...
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Block YouTube Ads on AppleTV by Decrypting and Stripping Ads from Profobuf
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).
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How Turborepo is porting from Go to Rust
On optional.. this was a regression in proto that is somewhat helped by https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/docs/f... ; I have no idea whether protobuf for rust has started taking advantage of this.
JSON is awful in every way.
recent versions of proto3 have added back the “optional” keyword that can be used on any field. see: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/docs/f...
jk
- Jsonnet – The Data Templating Language
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The Curse of NixOS
People have tried: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk
But yeah I agree. The thing is, if all you need is robust determinism why do you need a full functional language with currying and other complex concepts?
Google had the same problem for Bazel, and their solution (Starlark) is way easier to understand.
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Pants vs. Bazel: Why Pants may be the right choice for your team
If I were writing a build system today (and I did just write one actually to test out some ideas) I would use Typescript for the language with something like jk to provide hermeticity. Typescript has many advantages, especially over Python, but mainly:
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The Perfect Configuration Format? Try TypeScript
Great little writeup ! After mangling YAML, HCL, JSON for years as an ops engineer, I have come to the same realisation. In fact, I have put this into practice in production pipelines by using: jkcfg[1] for the last couple of years. Two data points: 1. Zero developer support contract rate around YAML syntax and templating issues 2. High number of contributions in our private typescript configuration library from developers. Using typescript as an ops frontend has made operations a lot more approachable to folks.
Recently I took what learnt in the last 2 years using jkcfg/typescript and taken it to Deno in form of an opinionated port of jkcfg called: dxcfg[2]. Its early days, but I would bet on Deno/typescript for future ops configuration.
It's possible to sandbox most languages, and with some work you can probably make them deterministic too.
Here's an example: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk
That beats having to learn an entirely new language.
Why? The only reasons I can think of are:
* They can be non-deterministic (do a different thing each time you run them).
* They can be non-hermetic (access stuff in the environment you don't know about).
* They can do naughty security things.
* You can't present GUIs of them because they aren't declarative.
All but the last one don't exclude programming languages. Here's an interesting project to make hermetic deterministic Javascript (Typescript support is planned):
For the sorts of places where you don't have a GUI for the settings anyway (which is the common case) I think it makes loads of sense. It beats making the kind of declarative programming languages you see in YAML files.
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Cue: A new language for data validation
Maybe Javascript? A lot of web tools support Javascript config files. There's this nice-looking effort to provide a hermetic execution environment for them: https://github.com/jkcfg/jk and if you use Typescript you get an extremely good static type system too. Plus the language is already very well known with loads of tool support and documentation.
Definitely what I would use today.
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Boa release v0.13
You may be interested in jk. If you don't want to use a special purpose configuration language (jsonnet, cue, dhall, etc), this is a nice alternative that uses js in a hermetic runtime (but see their open issues for progress on that). They seem to also be adding native typescript support so you could even have type checking built-in.
What are some alternatives?
FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library
SBE - Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) - High Performance Message Codec
MessagePack - MessagePack implementation for C and C++ / msgpack.org[C/C++]
cereal - A C++11 library for serialization
Apache Parquet - Apache Parquet
Bond - Bond is a cross-platform framework for working with schematized data. It supports cross-language de/serialization and powerful generic mechanisms for efficiently manipulating data. Bond is broadly used at Microsoft in high scale services.
Protobuf.NET - Protocol Buffers library for idiomatic .NET
Boost.Serialization - Boost.org serialization module
Apache Avro - Apache Avro is a data serialization system.
Cap'n Proto - Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library
protostuff - Java serialization library, proto compiler, code generator
MessagePack for C# (.NET, .NET Core, Unity, Xamarin) - Extremely Fast MessagePack Serializer for C#(.NET, .NET Core, Unity, Xamarin). / msgpack.org[C#]