Protobuf VS json

Compare Protobuf vs json and see what are their differences.

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Protobuf json
171 93
63,263 39,639
0.9% -
10.0 7.6
6 days ago about 7 hours ago
C++ C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
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

Posts with mentions or reviews of Protobuf. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-09.

json

Posts with mentions or reviews of json. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-26.
  • Learn Modern C++
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    I have not done a "desktop" program in 25+ years and never using C++ (or C), since then I'm mostly a web developer (PHP,Elixir, JS, Kotlin etc).

    I'm currently doing a C++ audio plugin with the Juce framework.

    This website has been a good resource, alongside https://www.learncpp.com

    But I was actually close to give up before using those two things:

    - https://github.com/nlohmann/json : my plugin use a json api backend and the Juce json implementation is atrocious (apparently because of being born in previous c++ version), but this library is GREAT.

    - ChatGPT 4. I'm not sure I would have "succeeded" without it, at least not in a reasonable time frame. ChatGPT 3.5 is slow and does not give good results for my use case but 4 is impressive. And I use in a very dumb way, just posing question in the web UI. I probably could have it directly in MSVC?

    Also I must say, for all its flaws, I have a renewed appreciation for doing UI on the web ;)

  • What C++ library do you wish existed but hasn’t been created yet?
    18 projects | /r/cpp | 8 Jul 2023
    https://github.com/nlohmann/json works well for me
  • [CMake] Can't include external header in .h file
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 8 Jul 2023
    cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.15) project(xrpc++ DESCRIPTION "C++ AT Protocol XRPC library" VERSION 1.0.0 LANGUAGES CXX) include(FetchContent) FetchContent_Declare(cpr GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/libcpr/cpr.git GIT_TAG 2553fc41450301cd09a9271c8d2c3e0cf3546b73) # The commit hash for 1.10.x. Replace with the latest from: https://github.com/libcpr/cpr/releases FetchContent_MakeAvailable(cpr) FetchContent_Declare(json URL https://github.com/nlohmann/json/releases/download/v3.11.2/json.tar.xz) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(json) add_library(${PROJECT_NAME} SHARED src/lexicon.cpp src/xrpc.cpp ) target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE cpr::cpr) target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE nlohmann_json::nlohmann_json) set_target_properties(${PROJECT_NAME} PROPERTIES VERSION ${PROJECT_VERSION}) set_target_properties(${PROJECT_NAME} PROPERTIES SOVERSION 1) target_include_directories(${PROJECT_NAME} PUBLIC include) set(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE debug)
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 8 Jul 2023
    FetchContent_Declare(json URL https://github.com/nlohmann/json/releases/download/v3.11.2/json.tar.xz) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(json)
  • What are some ways I can serialize objects?
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 25 Apr 2023
  • C++ Reflection for Component Serialization and Inspection
    3 projects | /r/gameenginedevs | 4 Mar 2023
    Exemple of a JSON library: https://github.com/nlohmann/json (For XML, there's tinyxml)
  • How to convert a json file to CSV ?
    2 projects | /r/cpp | 28 Feb 2023
    https://github.com/nlohmann/json and https://github.com/d99kris/rapidcsv are single header file include libs
  • PocketPy: A Lightweight(~5000 LOC) Python Implementation in C++17
    8 projects | /r/cpp | 6 Feb 2023
  • A small open source library Open AI C++
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 30 Jan 2023
    Looks like this makes a json string with https://github.com/nlohmann/json then uses libcurl to send it to a URL using an API key that has to be in an environment variable.
  • C++ Packages for a custom Game Engine - That One Game Dev
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 28 Jan 2023
    I would add an honorable mention for Niels Lohmann's Json library. It is less performant than RapidJSON, but it easier to use and integrate imo. If JSON based IO isn't a hot path in your game, this lib will likely be easier to use.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Protobuf and json you can also consider the following projects:

FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library

RapidJSON - A fast JSON parser/generator for C++ with both SAX/DOM style API

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

JsonCpp - A C++ library for interacting with JSON.

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