Protocol Buffers - Interface design language

Protocol Buffers is an open source interface design language created in 2008.

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Protocol Buffers is a method of serializing structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a wire or for storing data. The method involves an interface description language that describes the structure of some data and a program that generates source code from that description for generating or parsing a stream of bytes that represents the structured data. Read more on Wikipedia...

Tags: interface design language
There are at least 23,747 Protocol Buffers repos on GitHub
Early development of Protocol Buffers happened in Google
The Google BigQuery Public Dataset GitHub snapshot shows 10k users using Protocol Buffers in 12k repos on GitHub
ANTLR grammar for Protocol Buffers
Monaco package for syntax highlighting Protocol Buffers
Pygments supports syntax highlighting for Protocol Buffers
GitHub supports syntax highlighting for Protocol Buffers
Indeed.com has 94 matches for "protocol buffers developer".
See also: (12 related languages) XML, Thrift, Java, C#, Python, Go, Ruby, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Scala, Julia
50 PLDB concepts link to Protocol Buffers: Ace Editor, Apache Hbase, Apache Arrow, AT Protocol, avro, Bazel, Cap'n Proto, Carbon, CIR, Claro, Closure Templates, crush, Cue, dgraph, egel, EverParse3D, firrtl, FlatBuffers, Flutter, groff, HHVM, Impala, Ion, Iterm2, kaitai, ko, Kotlin, Kubernetes, Logica, m3db, MicroPython, MongoDB, Obsidian, onnx, OpenCV, Please Build, PROMETHEUS, Pygments, PyTorch, Quint, Rholang, RocksDB, Solidity, tao3d, TensorFlow, VLC, Wyvern, Xgboost, XGBoost, YARA

Example from the web:

message Person {
  required string name = 1;
  required int32 id = 2;
  optional string email = 3;
}

Example from Linguist:

package tutorial;

option java_package = "com.example.tutorial";
option java_outer_classname = "AddressBookProtos";

message Person {
  required string name = 1;
  required int32 id = 2;
  optional string email = 3;

  enum PhoneType {
    MOBILE = 0;
    HOME = 1;
    WORK = 2;
  }

  message PhoneNumber {
    required string number = 1;
    optional PhoneType type = 2 [default = HOME];
  }

  repeated PhoneNumber phone = 4;
}

message AddressBook {
  repeated Person person = 1;
}

Example from Wikipedia:

// polyline.cpp
#include "polyline.pb.h"  // generated by calling "protoc polyline.proto"

Line* createNewLine(const std::string& name) {
  // create a line from (10, 20) to (30, 40)
  Line* line = new Line;
  line->mutable_start()->set_x(10);
  line->mutable_start()->set_y(20);
  line->mutable_end()->set_x(30);
  line->mutable_end()->set_y(40);
  line->set_label(name);
  return line;
}

Polyline* createNewPolyline() {
  // create a polyline with points at (10,10) and (20,20)
  Polyline* polyline = new Polyline;
  Point* point1 = polyline->add_point();
  point1->set_x(10);
  point1->set_y(10);
  Point* point2 = polyline->add_point();
  point2->set_x(20);
  point2->set_y(20);
  return polyline;
}

Protocol Buffers Keywords

syntax import weak public package option repeated oneof map reserved to max enum message service rpc stream returns package optional true false

Language features

Feature	Supported	Example	Token
Integers	✓	// \d+[LlUu]*
Floats	✓	// (\d+\.\d\|\.\d+\|\d+)[eE][+-]?\d+[LlUu]
Hexadecimals	✓	// 0x[0-9a-fA-F]+[LlUu]*
Octals	✓	// 0[0-7]+[LlUu]*
Access Modifiers	✓
Booleans	✓		true false
MultiLine Comments	✓	/* A comment */	/* */
Strings	✓
Comments	✓	// A comment
Line Comments	✓	// A comment	//
Semantic Indentation	X