- Protobuf also known as Protocol Buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.
- Define how you want your data to be structured, then you can use special generated code to easily write and read your structured data.
- Currently, it support generated code in Java, Python, Golang, C++.
- The latest version
proto3, also supports golang, Ruby, JavaScript and C# etc.
| Number range | Comments |
|---|---|
| 1 | Smallest field number that you can specify. |
| 2^29 | Largest field number that you can specify. |
| 1 - 15 | Take one byte to encode. |
| 16 - 2047 | Take two bytes to encode. |
| 19000 - 19999 | Are reserved for the Protocol buffers implementation. Compiler will throw error if we used this range. |
- Here are the list of type supported https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#scalar
Notes:
- For Enum type, first constant must be mapped with zero
- Fasters compare to other formats.
- RPC support.
- Lack of resources and smaller community.
- Lack of support.
- Non-human readability.