protocolbuffers/protobuf

Protocol Buffers, often called protobuf, is Google's system for serializing structured data. Serialization means converting data from the format your program works with in memory into a compact sequence of bytes that can be stored in a file or sent over a network. The same bytes can then be deserialized back into the original data structure by another program, even if that program is written in a different language or running on a different computer. Protobuf solves the problem of efficiently exchanging structured data between services, especially in situations where speed and compact message size matter. The system works in two parts. First, you define your data structures in a .proto schema file using a simple language-agnostic syntax, for example specifying that a message has a string name field and an integer age field. Then you run the protoc compiler tool on that schema, and it generates source code in your target language (Java, Python, C++, Go, C#, Ruby, and others are supported) with classes and serialization logic already built in. You import the generated code into your project and use it to create, populate, serialize, and deserialize messages. The resulting binary encoding is much more compact than JSON or XML because field names are replaced with small numeric identifiers. You would use protobuf when building systems where multiple services need to exchange data efficiently, particularly in microservice architectures or mobile applications where bandwidth and processing overhead matter. It is the underlying format used by gRPC, Google's remote procedure call framework. The compiler and core runtime are written in C++, but the project ships runtime libraries for a wide range of languages. This repository contains the compiler tool and the official runtimes for most supported languages.