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Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018)

I’ve spent a good deal of my professional life arguing against using protobuffers. They’re clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has.

Put away your email client that is half-way through writing me about how “Google is filled with the world’s best engineers,” and that “anything they build is, by definition, not built by amateurs.” I don’t want to hear it. As we’ll see when we discuss protobuffers’ claim to being god’s gift to backwards- and forwards-compatible APIs, this inability to distinguish between unset and default values is a nightmare. One of the frequently cited killer features of protobuffers is their “hassle-free ability to write backwards- and forwards-compatible APIs.” This is the claim that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

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