Ha, thanks Em! Wasn't sure anybody would recognize my name, still. :)
Scoped by default sounds good. And I think that timeline would work for me,
actually. And for what I'm working on, I can pick any edition I want; it's
essentially green-field work where I get to define the format.
So how would that look? Like say today I have:
message Wrapper {
enum Foo {
UNSPECIFIED = 1;
BAR = 1;
}
}
Today I would be referring to that as Wrapper::Foo::BAR, IIRC (I haven't
done C++ proto in a long time) or Wrapper.Foo.BAR in Python/Java (IIRC?).
What does "enum Foo" at the top level look like instead?
Basically I'm wondering: if I want to prepare for it now, can I name the
empty messages in a particular way that will help me stay
forward-compatible.
Oh, and prototiller sounds cool. :)
-Max
On Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 9:07 AM Em Rauch <[email protected]> wrote:
> Always nice to recognize a xoogler name 🙂
>
> Broadly, the plan is for a future Edition number to have enums be treated
> as scoped by default, but with a feature setting that opts back in to
> current behavior for people who want to upgrade the Edition number of
> preexisting .proto files perfectly-behavior-preserving (behavior-preserving
> uprades should be tool assisted with a tool called Prototiller, whose OSS
> implementation is unfortunately still not stabilized yet as we are
> rewriting it to Go).
>
> Scoped enums is close to the top of the candidates list for Edition 2026
> which is targeted for 2026-Q3, but we don't have any firm commitments
> around Edition 2026 details at the moment.
>
> We don't intend to change the enum behavior on
> proto2/proto3/Edition-2023/Edition-2024 files (or even support an option
> there to do so), as our forward Editions strategy is to generally treat the
> behavior of older syntax IDL inputs as fixed as the way to avoid the
> ecosystem problems that come from even adding new options that old
> impls/infrastructure won't know about. So unfortunately anyone who plans to
> stay on Proto3 forever won't get the new goodness, you'll need to continue
> to just wrap each enum in an empty message if you want to avoid the stupid
> value name collision problems.
>
> > Is that actually on a roadmap anywhere? I don't see it in Issues.
>
> We mostly don't use Issues for tracking our roadmap work, primarily Issues
> is for handling external bugs/requests/discussion (unlike gRPC which has
> community-driven CNCF governance, Protobuf is still a Google project). If
> you want to open it on Issues so you can be notified when it moves forward,
> free to open and I'll tag the issue appropriately and we can try to
> remember to keep it up to date.
>
> Thanks!
>
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 8:49 AM Max Kanat-Alexander <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hey proto team! :) The current docs say that scoped enums will be part of
>> a future edition. Is that actually on a roadmap anywhere? I don't see it in
>> Issues. I'm mostly just wondering if I should expect it by some vague date.
>>
>> I'm playing around with defining a configuration language based on a
>> strict subset of textproto, and scoped enums would help a ton so that users
>> could just write `state: ACTIVE` instead of the unintuitive `state:
>> STATE_ACTIVE` in their config files. I know that I can accomplish that
>> today by nesting enums inside of messages, but what I'm curious about is if
>> the future potential implementation of scoped enums will break backwards
>> compatibility with that in some way.
>>
>> -Max
>>
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>>
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