Google protocol buffers, pretty cool

I just spotted this. Google prototype buffers. It looks like an extensible IDL like way to describe objects that need to be serialized between machines and between languages. It's all Apache 2.0 licensed so if you're looking for efficient object serialization then this looks like a good space efficient and CPU efficient alternative to XML, Java serialization or similar mechanisms.

Comments

[Paul Anderson]

Billy... I profiled it this morning... nice to see people are thinking about fast serialisation but it's not as fast as it could be.... quite a lot of waste. I'm working on a similar tech at the moment, it's more limited in function but probably 100x faster.

[Christof Meerwald]

Aren't there already enough standards for this? What about XDR, CDR, ASN1?

And why invent another interface definition language and not use (a aub/super-set of) IDL?

[Paul Anderson]

Christof, One thing that seems to have defined protocol marshalling is variety and choice. A question would be why do XDR, CNR and ASN1 exist as we already have RMI/IIOP. A possible reason in this case I suppose is performance.