gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

I’ve read about it when it was announced, but recently Billy blogged about Google Protocol Buffers and I had to think about it again.

I’m still not sure who’s going to be interested in using this. It seems to be very focused on the task that Google needed it to do and this is not the only serialization game in town that also doesn’t have any integration into other products. It has multiple implementations in various programming languages, but apart from this I don’t really see how it is really new or different.

There has been quite a discussion in the comments of the announcement blog entry about the performance of protocol buffers and the differences to ASN.1 and CORBA.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s an interesting thing in itself and I also like the license, but I wouldn’t want to be the first to use this and integrate it with other systems and prove that it actually works for anyone else than Google.