Even if protobuf isn't your preferred serializer, having any tight binary format be the standard across the ecosystem is miles better than everything slinging JSON around.

Lord knows how much energy we are wasting turning binary data into human readable text that no human will ever look at before it's parsed back into binary.

Performance aside, it's also really nice how a protobuf spec tells you what data structure to expect ahead of time for an API.

The number of APIs with a single JSON example as the only documentation is... unfortunate. Especially if you want to know if a field is nullable.

Taking this a bit further, it's surprising how many companies sell API as a service but provide minimal support for that API, publishing like 1 client/sdk (and often not in the language you need, lol).

Just mindblowing that companies don't adopt a schema-first approach to appeal to a broader customer base. I've lost count of the number of hnd rolled clients I've had to write over the years.

It gets even better if the API itself is backed by some RPC framework. With that, users can simply generate a client and get going.

It feels like we can do better as an industry, this cracked me up because it's so true.

"a single JSON example as the only documentation is... unfortunate"

Funny you should mention nullability. That was a big debate in proto2 vs proto3.

XDR was already a core part of NFS. And then there was a DEC alternative also.

It's simple, lightweight, safe serialization. If you need to convert data structures to bytes, you're going to use protobuf or something comparable.

golang is a Google technology, so protobuf is going to be there, right? Moreover golang is compiled and protobuf interoperates best with compiled languages.

Now just wait for golang packages that have conflicting editions requirements!

Because the same group in google developed both, indeed.

They were developed as a microservice high-performance lang, compiler, and serialization protocol in the same meetings.

Where are you getting this nonsense from, and if you're just speculating, why are you stating it with such confidence as a fact? Protobufs predate Go by more than half a decade, and there is no overlap between the authors.

Per multiple sources, including the team currently maintaining the Protobuf toolchain within Google, proto3 was largely designed by Rob Pike. Of course the Protobuf wire format is quite a bit older, but some aspects of proto3 and Go's shared semantics (like implicit zero values) do seem to have come from the same mind.

That's a much smaller claim, proto3 schemas are a fairly minor evolution over proto2 schemas, mostly removing features. My impression was always that it was either removing things that were expensive to support in Javascript, impossible to serialize to idiomatic JSON, or that the team thought were misfeatures that nobody should ever use. That's a far cry from the original claim that Go and protobufs were co-designed "in the same meetings".

But even that limited claim is kind of hard to believe. Can you link to one of those multiple sources making that claim?

proto1 was designed by Sanjay and Jeff, proto2 by Kenton Varda (who later designed Cap'n'Proto), proto3 I can't remember who but I never heard Rob Pike being credited with this. He did write the very first Go proto binding package though and a separate serialization package called gob with a totally separate rpc library.

You WILL accept The One Right Way to write code and serialize data! -rob pike

Do wake me when they get around to adding the 'high performance' lang part though. Wild how all this ecosystem junk originates from a few early Googlers' fear of learning beautiful C.

Just for posterity, I actually agree with you, and was representing the history of our situation. Not my own opinions. “High performance” absolutely means “buzzword.”

I can attest that the intentions were good, and it’s another tool in our toolbox. A good one, but not the silver bullet sometimes some said.

Because it's useful? What do you propose instead?

Smoke signals