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protocolbuffers
protobuf
C++2014–2026
protocolbuffers / protobuf

protobuf

Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format

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89Distinct people
124Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
72.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 8:59:20 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year124 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-12-15 12:38:35 UTC to 2026-10-09 18:07:50 UTC.

0510152014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 2 submissions, 9 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 3 submissions, 8 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 0 submissions, 12 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 0 submissions, 13 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 1 submissions, 13 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 2 submissions, 12 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 1 submissions, 14 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1129
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1138
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12012
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13013
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14113
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14212
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15114
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format Copyright 2008 Google LLC Overview Protocol Buffers (a.k.a., protobuf) are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. You can learn more about it in protobuf's documentation. This README file contains protobuf installation instructions. To install protobuf, you need to install the protocol compiler (used to compile .proto files) and the protobuf runtime for your chosen programming language. Working With Protobuf Source Code Most users will find working from supported releases to be the easiest path. If you choose to work from the head revision of the main branch your build will occasionally be broken by source-incompatible changes and insufficiently-tested (and therefore broken) behavior. If you are using C++ or otherwise need to build protobuf from source as a part of your project, you should pin to a release commit on a release branch. This is because even release branches can experience some instability in between release commits. Bazel with Bzlmod Protobuf supports Bzlmod with Bazel 8 +. Users should specify a dependency on protobuf in their MODULE.bazel file as follows. bazel_dep(name = "protobuf", version = <VERSION>) Users can optionally override the repo name, such as for compatibility with WORKSPACE. bazel_dep(name = "protobuf", version = <VERSION>, repo_name = "com_google_protobuf") Bazel with WORKSPACE Users can also add the following to their legacy WORKSPACE file. Note that with the release of 30.x there are a few more load statements to properly set up rules_java and rules_python. http_archive( name = "com_google_protobuf", strip_prefix = "protobuf-VERSION", sha256 = ..., url = ..., ) load("@com_google_protobuf//:protobuf_deps.bzl", "protobuf_deps") protobuf_deps() load("@rules_java//java:rules_java_deps.bzl", "rules_java_dependencies") rules_java_dependencies() load("@rules_java//java:repositories.bzl", "rules_java_toolchains") rules_java_toolchains() load("@rules_python//python:repositories.bzl", "py_repositories") py_repositories() Protobuf Compiler Installation The protobuf compiler is written in C++. If you are using C++, please follow the C++ Installation Instructions to install protoc along with the C++ runtime. For non-C++ users, the simplest way to install the protocol compiler is to download a pre-built binary from our GitHub release page. In the downloads section of each release, you can find pre-built binaries in zip packages: protoc-$VERSION-$PLATFORM.zip. It contains the protoc binary as well as a set of standard .proto files distributed along with protobuf. If you are looking for an old version that is not available in the release page, check out the Maven repository. These pre-built binaries are only provided for released versions. If you want to use the github main version at HEAD, or you need to modify protobuf code, or you are using C++, it's recommended to build your own protoc binary from source. If you would like to build protoc binary from source, see the C++ Installation Instructions. Protobuf Runtime Installation Protobuf supports several different programming languages. For each programming language, you can find instructions in the corresponding source directory about how to install protobuf runtime for that specific language: Language Source C++ (include C++ runtime and protoc) src Java java Python python Objective-C objectivec C# csharp Ruby ruby Go protocolbuffers/protobuf-go PHP php Dart dart-lang/protobuf JavaScript protocolbuffers/protobuf-javascript Quick Start The best way to learn how to use protobuf is to follow the tutorials in our developer guide. If you want to learn from code examples, take a look at the examples in the examples directory. Documentation The complete documentation is available at the Protocol Buffers doc site. Support Policy Read about our version support policy to stay current on support timeframes for the language libraries. Developer Community To be alerted to upcoming changes in Protocol Buffers and connect with protobuf developers and users, join the Google Group.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

11 sources
e1ven·Dec 17, 2015
That's fair. I only have my experience to draw from, but I've personally found it very straight forward. Gevent said it looks like they're supporting Python3 as of the 1.1 release - http://www.gevent.org/whatsnew_1_1.html I've used requests with Python3 quite a bit.. I have no idea why it's not listed as supported on the WoS, but their page shows it as working since 2012. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/requests/ Protobugs looks like it's now Py3 compatible, per the devs- https://github.com/google/protobuf/issues/646 ThriftPy has supported Python3 for a while (although ThriftPy is slower than the official lib). Apache Thrift has recently begun working with Python3 as well, however (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-1857) I run Ansible/etc in their own virtualenvs, so they aren't part of system python for me, but you're right - I d
Read the rest
id have to write an Ansible module recently, and I recall that I did have to use Py2. The only major package I recall having a problem with was PIL - Eventually I moved to Pillow as a drop-in replacement.
In Why Python 3 Exists
cfallin·Nov 1, 2015
One example where I've found SFINAE useful is in using "type traits" to tag different classes, and then writing containers to handle the classes differently based on their tags (see [1]). For example, in arena-allocation support for protobufs, we wanted to be able to skip a destructor call to a message object if the object used only arena-allocated storage (hence had no cleanup to do). So we added a "DestructorSkippable_" typedef to any class where this was true: class MyObject { private: friend class Arena; typedef void DestructorSkippable_; // ... }; And then the SFINAE use at the implementation linked below [1] can either register a destructor callback, or not, depending on the class (by providing two overrides to a function, one that takes a T::DestructorSkippable_* param and one that doesn't). T
Read the rest
he essential thing about this is that it's resolved at compile time, so there's zero overhead (not even a runtime conditional-check) in the destructor-skipped case. When optimizations are enabled, constant prop and dead-code elimination can completely remove a feature that's "disabled" by a certain type trait. [1] https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/src/google/pr...
In C++'s SFINAE concept: compile-time introspection of a class
kentonv·Aug 26, 2015
Hey Josh, For apps that fit the model, a client-side approach can work well. There are a lot of limitations, though, that make it not ideal for a lot of apps. An incomplete list of issues: - Basically all existing apps with server-side code would need to be rewritten to fit in this model. (Sandstorm can run arbitrary Linux binaries.) - A large class of apps fundamentally need to be running even when you aren't present. E.g., a mail server. - Sharing with other users, or connecting to other app instances, is tricky at best when there's no server to mediate. - Real-time collaboration requires much lower latency than you can get when syncing through Dropbox and the like. You could maybe pull it off through WebRTC but it's much easier to use a server. - Access control is really hard to enforce without an app-aware server. E.g. if you want to
Read the rest
give users permission to comment on your doc but not edit it, how do you do that with dropbox permissions? - Limited sandboxing: Generally you can't e.g. prevent the app from secretly phoning home to its developer, at least given the security model currently provided by e.g. Chrome. PS. offtopic but can you merge this PR? :D https://github.com/google/protobuf/pull/710
In Sandstorm App Market

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