Sandy Maguire personal blog
Arguing against using protobuffers
I’ve spent a good deal of my professional life arguing against using protobuffers. They’re clearly written by amateurs, unbelievably ad-hoc, mired in gotchas, tricky to compile, and solve a problem that nobody but Google really has. If these problems of protobuffers remained quarantined in serialization abstractions…
- Points
- 307
- HN comments
- 874
- Submissions
- 4
- Cited by
- 3 commenters
Software EngineeringSystems & Performance2018
On Hacker News
| Submitted | Title on HN | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 10, 2018 | Arguing against using protobuffers by haskellandchill | 307 | 298 |
| Sep 5, 2025 | Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018) by b-man | 244 | 307 |
| Dec 24, 2019 | Protobuffers Are Wrong by based2 | 229 | 210 |
| Mar 23, 2023 | Protobuffers Are Wrong (2018) by alihm | 82 | 59 |
Cited in comments
Linked from 3 Hacker News comments by 3 different people, from Oct 2018 to Dec 2021.
Most recent:
- ghostwriter · Dec 9, 2021
- User23 · Jul 20, 2020
- endgame · Oct 25, 2018
