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I tried to use ASN.1 and there were no libraries to use at the time. Protocol buffers exist to product compact messages where varint encoding can shine, and to produce forward-compatible messages when server schemas get updated (I don't know how ASN.1 handles that).

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ASN.1 has been around _dramatically_ longer than protobufs - I don't think I can take lack of libraries as a legitimate reason.

Its maturity is not that interesting. I worked with Sun XDR back in the day (roughly the same origin time as ASN.1) and it was massively better in terms of tooling. Even at the time I tried to work with it, I had a hard time finding any decent C or python library that worked smoothly with ASN.1 (define schema, generate bindings, parse and serializes messages). Both of those are dirt-simple in XDR and pb.

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