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Comment by 7e | Hacker News Reader

This bystander has been using protobufs for more than ten years. I'm not sure what I need to deliver since ASN.1, Cap'n Proto and Flatbuffers are all more efficient and exist already. ASN.1 was on the scene in 1984 and was already more efficient than protobufs.

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Protobuf has far better ergonomics than ASN.1. ASN.1 is an overcomplicated design-by-committee mess. Backwards compatibility in particular is much harder.

I don't doubt your experience, but with X.509 having evolved substantially, and ASN.1 on billions (if not tens of billions) of devices, in practice it seems OK. And it was formally verified early.

ASN.1 on billions of devices doesn’t make it less of an anti-ergonomic, design-by-committee piece of crap. Unless your goal is to be binary-compatible with these devices, one should be free to explore alternatives.

By all means, keep using it, but it might be worth figuring out why other people don’t. Hint: it’s not because they’re more stupid than you or are looking to get promoted by big G.

(Personally, I like the ideas and binary encoding behind Capn Proto more than all the alternatives)

One of the advantages of of protobuf I never see anyone highlight is how neat and well-designed the wireformat is, in terms of backward/forward compatibility and lowlevel stuff you can do with it. Very useful when building big and demanding systems over time.

For high performance and critical stuff, SBE is much more suitable, but it doesn't have as good of a schema evolution story as protobuf.

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