thank you. So indeed it's, as corrrectly described, schemaless i.e. schema agnostic, which falls into "schema responsibility being passed to user/dev" (I should have picked up what it means when writing that).

So it's basically Stubby/gRPC.

From strictly a RPC perspective this makes sense (i guess to the same degree gRPC would be agnostic to protobuf serialization scheme, which IIRC is the case (also thinking Stubby was called that for the same reason)).

However, that would mean some there's

1. a ton of responsibility on the user/dev —i.e. the same amount that prompted protobuf to exist, afterall.

You basically have the (independent problem of) clients, servers and data (in fligiht, or even persisted) that get different versions of the schema.

2. a missied implicit compression opportunity? IDK to what extent this actually happens on the fly or not.