Critical Analysis: Why Protocol Buffers Are Poorly Designed Technology
By
b-man
The kind of bagel that ruins lesser bagels for you.
Summary
A strongly opinionated critique arguing that Protocol Buffers (protobuffers) are poorly designed, created by amateurs, and solve problems that only Google truly faces. The author contends that protobuffers are ad-hoc, filled with gotchas, difficult to compile, and that their bad design negatively impacts application code beyond just serialization layers.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledI'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
solve a problem that nobody but Google really has
the bad design of protobuffers is so persuasive that these problems manage to leak their way into your code as well
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