Just for fun, how often do regular-sized companies that deal in regular-sized traffic need Protobuf to accomplish their goals in the first place, compared to JSON or even XML with basic string marshalling?
I never used it, coding since 1986.
Replacing Protobuf with Rust
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: Replacing Protobuf with Rust
#42Just for fun, how often do regular-sized companies that deal in regular-sized traffic need Protobuf to accomplish their goals in the first place, compared to JSON or even XML with basic string marshalling?
Besides the other comments already here about code gen & contracts, a bigger one for me to step away from json/xml is binary serialization. It sounds weird, and its totally dependent on your use case, but binary serialization can make a giant difference. For me, I work with 3D data which is primarily (but not only) tightly packed arrays of floats & ints. I have a bunch of options available: 1. JSON/XML, readable, eas…
This was the norm many years ago, I worked on a simulation software which existed long before Protobuf was even an apple in it's authors eyes. The whole thing was on a server architecture with a Java (later ported to Qt) GUI and a C++ core. The solver periodically sent data in a custom binary format over TCP for vector fields and things.
Re: Replacing Protobuf with Rust
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're saying we choose Protobufs [1] because Google maintains it but not FlatBuffers [2]? [1] - https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf : Google's data interchange format [2] - https://github.com/google/flatbuffers : Also maintained by Google
I get the OP is off base with his remark - but at the same time maintained by Google means shit in practice. AFAIK they have a bunch of production infra on protobuff/gRPC - not so sure about flatbufferrs which came out of the game dev side - that's the difference maker to me - which project is actually rooted in.
Flatbuffers are fine - I think it is used in many places that needs zero-copy. Also outside google, it powers the Arrow format which is the foundation of modern analytics
Re: Replacing Protobuf with Rust
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, cap'n'proto is written by the same person who created protobuf, so they are legit (and that somewhat jokish claim is simply that it requires no parsing).
> I mean, cap'n'proto is written by the same person who created protobuf Notably, Protobuf 2, a rewrite of Protobuf 1. Protobuf 1 was created by Sanjay Ghemawat, I believe.
Google loves to reinvent shit because they didn't understand it. And to get promo. In this case, ASN.1. And protobufs are so inefficient that they drive up latency and datacenter costs, so they were a step backwards. Good job, Sanjay.
Re: Replacing Protobuf with Rust
#45Just for fun, how often do regular-sized companies that deal in regular-sized traffic need Protobuf to accomplish their goals in the first place, compared to JSON or even XML with basic string marshalling?
I dunno, are you sure you can manually write correct de/serializaiton for JSON and XML so strings, floats and integer formats correctly get parsed between JavaScript, Java, Python, Go, Rust, C++ and any other languages?
Do you want to maintain that and debug that? Do you want to do all of that without help of a compiler enforcing the schema and failing compiles/CI when someone accidentally changes the schema?
Because you get all of that with protobuf if you use them appropriately.
You can of course build all of this yourself... and maybe it'll even be as efficient, performant and supported. Maybe.
Re: Replacing Protobuf with Rust
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they made the headline something on the line of "replacing protobuf with a native, optimized implementation" would not get the same attention as putting rust in the title to attract the everything-in-rust-is-better crowd.
That never happens. Instead, it always attracts the opposite group, the Rust complainers, where they go and complain about how "the everything-in-rust-is-better crowd created yet another fake headline to pretend that Rust is the panacea". Which results in a lot of engagement. Old ragebait trick.
"never" huh?
Re: Replacing Protobuf with Rust
#47I find the title a bit misleading. I think it should be titled It’s Faster to Copy Memory Directly than Send a Protobuf. Which then seems rather obvious that removing a serialization and deserialization step reduces runtime.
TIL serializing a protobuf is only 5 times slower than copying memory, which is way faster than I thought it’d be. Impressive given all the other nice things protobuf offers to development teams.
Re: Replacing Protobuf with Rust
#48Just for fun, how often do regular-sized companies that deal in regular-sized traffic need Protobuf to accomplish their goals in the first place, compared to JSON or even XML with basic string marshalling?
Protobuf is fantastic because it separates the definition from the language. When you make changes, you recompile your definitions to native code and you can be sure it will stay compatible with other languages and implementations.
You mean like WSDL, OpenAPI and every other schema definition format?
Well I agree. Contract-first is great. You provide your clients with the specs and let them generate their own bindings. And as a client they're great too because I can also easily generate a mock server implementation that I can use in tests.
Re: Replacing Protobuf with Rust
#49tldr: they replaced using protobuf as the type system across language boundaries for FFI with true FFI
Title is as nonsensical as "We replaced Windows with ARM CPUs"
Re: Replacing Protobuf with Rust
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they made the headline something on the line of "replacing protobuf with a native, optimized implementation" would not get the same attention as putting rust in the title to attract the everything-in-rust-is-better crowd.
That never happens. Instead, it always attracts the opposite group, the Rust complainers, where they go and complain about how "the everything-in-rust-is-better crowd created yet another fake headline to pretend that Rust is the panacea". Which results in a lot of engagement. Old ragebait trick.
At the very least it gets more upvotes.