I might be missing something - why would this be a breakthrough? It sounds complicated to generate the interfaces, sure, but is there a theoretical problem blocking this, or just practical?
I really wish though that there were more traction here, as I really believe that we should be quite prepared do deal with bits and not protobufs by default. nothing wrong with protobufs for quite a number of uses. I just don't know why people are so afraid of and/or biased against bit strings.
Are we not talking about writing binary files that conform to the spec?
Like, in the case of a GIF: simply writing valid garbage data should produce a file that presents as a valid GIF with noise for the image. Similarly: reading the file through the parser and writing it out unmodified should create an identical file (assuming no stenography).
Right?
There are already similarly declarative tools which can accomplish this. Haskell has binary parsing libraries which work similarly and give you both reading and writing capabilities.
It's a declarative bit-level symmetrical reader writer generator library.