To be fair, if that's what you need ProtoBuf isn't the only option. Cap'n Proto[1], JSON Schema[2], or any other well supported message-definition language could probably achieve that as well, each with their own positives and negatives.
However, it is still heavily under development and not ready for production use. Definitely looking for GitHub Sponsors or other type of funding to support it :)
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To be fair, if that's what you need ProtoBuf isn't the only option. Cap'n Proto[1], JSON Schema[2], or any other well supported message-definition language could probably achieve that as well, each with their own positives and negatives.
[1]: https://capnproto.org/
[2]: https://json-schema.org/
Big fan of Cap'n Proto here, but to be fair it doesn't support as many languages as Protobuf/gRPC yet.
I'm currently building a Protocol Buffers alternative that uses JSON Schema instead: https://jsonbinpack.sourcemeta.com/. It was proven on research to be as or more space-efficient than any considered alternative (https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12799).
However, it is still heavily under development and not ready for production use. Definitely looking for GitHub Sponsors or other type of funding to support it :)