Hello, I just discovered this developers tool, and I can't understand why it was invented. Why didn't Google use ASN.1, which is standard and it is used for this, to make a language, platform independent description of data to be enconded later as XML, or different binary formats, that can be faster and more efficient?
All this is like reinventing ASN.1 For instance, the example shown on the web page : 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]; } In ASN.1, which is a standard used for over 20years, the same could be written similar to this (I haven't used it in a while, maybe I made some mistakes ): PhoneType ::= ENUMERATED { MOBILE, HOME, WORK } PhoneNumber ::= SEQUENCE { number [1] IA5String , phone [2] PhoneType DEFAULT HOME } Person ::= SEQUENCE { name [1] IA5String , id [2] INTEGER, email [3] OCTET STRING OPTIONAL phone [4] SET OF PhoneNumber } Best regards, Luis -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Protocol Buffers" group. To post to this group, send email to proto...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to protobuf+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/protobuf?hl=en.