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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/

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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 :)

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