> Protobuf now has modern IDE support for the first time
Weird post. I built IntelliJ protobuf support [1] while at Google like 10 years ago, and it started shipping by default with IntelliJ in ~2021. Maybe that's not considered "modern".
Sure, but having a generic LSP that works with all editors vs. an editor specific integration is still a very different thing.
It's a bit odd for the parent commenter to say "Weird post" and implying that having an editor specific feature would somehow make having an LSP that works for everyone be any less interesting.
The difference is that Buf's LSP is fully spec-complete since it's built on the same tooling that powers the buf CLI. I've seen several attempts at Protobuf LSPs over the years, but none that actually conform to the Protobuf specification, including the one you linked. That project is built on `emicklei/proto`, which readily accepts broken Protobuf and always has. The author says so in the README: "Current parser implementation is not completely validating .proto definitions." Maybe Buf should update the headline to "Protobuf finally has LSP support that works."
The bizarre "you're welcome" in the title is so obnoxious that I was sure it would be related to some sort of funny twist in the blog entry. Nope, they really thought that was appropriate.
Fair enough - feedback taken, we don't have a second career in comedy! Appreciate the feedback - we're renaming the post once GitHub is back online, and are adding the following to it for transparency:
> Edit: In full transparency, this blog post was originally titled "Protobuf finally has LSP support. You're Welcome." We thought this might generate some interest, but unfortunately this post sat unloved for months. Then, out of the blue, this post decided to make front page HN, and we received some choice feedback on our use of "You're Welcome" and our poor comedic abilities. Fair enough, we appreciate you speaking up - and we of course *thank you* for your continued support of our work!
Make sure to take reporting negativity bias into account. People will speak up when they don't like something, while stay quiet when everything is fine.
I, personally, enjoy Buf. It has solved many frustrations I've had with The Way it was previously done, manually installing protoc plugins, writing arcane flags into scripts nobody wants to touch, working around various quirks, like how protoc produces different output based on which directory you invoke it in, et cetera... I don't quite like the remote plugin model and rate limiting, but using local plugins is easy enough that it doesn't matter.
Buf has made my life easier, and I've actually been using `buf_ls` for a while now in NeoVim. I understand where the criticism of the title comes from, but I don't personally feel it in this particular case. In fact, I didn't even notice it.
I don't even mind the monetized properietary cloud thing, as long as Buf CLI and the related toolchain remains free software, serving the community. Hope you won't do the ol' switcharoo any time soon.
Totally, and we appreciate the sentiment. But the title was meant to be lighthearted, and instead it clearly struck a nerve. That's not our intent, and it was easy to change, so we just swallowed our pride. We rather the conversation be around Protobuf tooling, and not our poor comedy.
And the Buf CLI will always be free and OSS, don't worry!
I’ve seen similar wording from colleagues on the ASD (with Asperger’s).
It can be hard for some people to navigate the nuances between usage of a tongue-in-cheek usage of the phrase which is more socially acceptable or humorous from the version that reads as arrogant
It sounds like you're having a bad day or something. Putting "you're welcome" in the title of your own blog, on a free software release, is fine. It's not pushed into anyone's face. It loses some points for being a corporate ad but that would happen regardless of wording.
That's a shared chore. Do you not see the obvious differences in the situation? If they said "you're welcome" about an obligation like paying taxes and also made it very personal, then it would be close in feeling to your scenario. But it's not. If you offer a genuine gift, in a situation where there is no expectation of payback or debt, you can say you're welcome.
It’s impolite and weird to say “you’re welcome” when offering a gift for which the recipient did not first express gratitude. It follows “thank you;” it does not precede it.
Try this instead: give a stranger a piece of pre-chewed gum and say “you’re welcome!” Hell, even if it’s not pre-chewed, it’s just presumptuous and rude. You have no idea if they value it or not. They might not even like it.
Even if my barista handed me the coffee I ordered and said “you’re welcome” before I thanked them first, I’d think they’re a little off kilter.
Sounds like a you problem. If someone did me a service and told me I was welcome, my take would be entirely based on the delivery of the phrase. I don’t even know what to do with the gum analogy because that’s just nonsense.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the common passive-agressive use of "you're welcome" in exactly the kind of context the OP article uses it. But it's a thing, even if you haven't come across it.
Social condemnation has always been used to help keep the behavior of a group within certain acceptable bounds. Whether it's as effective in today's world of ever-escalating attention-seeking competition as it once was is questionable, though.
> Getting worked up is exactly the goal.
I don’t know who you think is worked up here, but it’s not me. I was merely expressing what impression the author’s choice of words left on me. And clearly I wasn’t alone in that regard. You are the one who chose to attack me as “projecting.”
...
You are getting a lot of feedback that you are the one who is mistaken here. Have you considered digesting it instead of defensively escalating?
You’re all here to clutch pearls. This has all turned into virtue signalling over a title. There are better things to be doing with your day. It doesn’t matter to you that they have no shame and it will roll off them like water off a ducks back?
Have you ever tried to shame a narcissist, or someone with BPD? It definitely does not work on them. They just try to destroy your life for you. The way to deal with that sort is, don’t deal with them at all. Give them nothing until they get bored and leave. If you count it all up there’s rather a lot of people for whom making it your job to control them is a bad outcome for everyone involved. It’s a generalization that has important exceptions.
> You’re all here to clutch pearls. This has all turned into virtue signalling over a title.
I disagree with your characterization, but you do you, I guess.
> There are better things to be doing with your day.
Perhaps so. There are probably better things for everyone on HN to be doing instead. Nevertheless, as autonomous people, we can choose our own priorities. I, for one, don't appreciate being told how to spend my time.
> Have you ever tried to shame a narcissist, or someone with BPD? It definitely does not work on them.
To be sure, a punch in the mouth may be more effective.
> To be sure, a punch in the mouth may be more effective.
HAH! Not all of us are big enough to get away with it, but you're not wrong.
Well, also there's been a lot of feedback on both sides. I wasn't the first one to suggest that the rabble rousing was misplaced here. So, I guess we are both guilty of ignoring feedback.
I am not being condescending. I save that for folks who start it. You don’t want to see me being condescending. Well actually you do, as long as it’s not aimed at you and you get popcorn.
Who is getting worked up? Who is "outraged", or looking to "manufacture" it?
I mean, the only person these descriptions apply to in this discussion is you.
Google's blog title is weird. Every normal human being that speaks English will find it weird. Maybe the author is on the spectrum, or maybe they thought their humour would carry better in a technical blog. Your agreement with this is not at all our concern.
We’re talking about basic etiquette here. I don’t have to manufacture it. If the score on my comment (which I know you can’t see but you’ll have to take my word for it) and other comments in this discussion that express similar sentiment are any indication (among them, “arrogant” and “obnoxious”), I’m by no means the only person who feels this way.
Try my experiments yourself if you disagree, and come back and let us all know how they went for you.
Saying "you're welcome" without a "thank you" preceding will sound passive aggressive to quite a lot of people; it's the type of thing that a parent does to chide a small child who forgets their manners in the same way they might prompt a child with "What's the magic word?" if they grabbed at something without saying please.
If this doesn't make sense to you, I'm not sure there's much anyone can do to convince you, because it's purely social convention. It's certainly possible that the author didn't realize it either, but having to deal with reactions about word choice when putting out writing explicitly for public consumption kinda comes with the territory.
This goes for Hacker News comments too of course, but as someone with no horse in this race, your interference about their word choice seems like much more of a stretch than theirs about the author. Not recognizing that a title to a blog post will evoke a negative reactions in a lot of readers does genuinely seem like information about the author socially in a way that having that common negative reaction does not.
They are doing us a favor, there's no denying that. Just like dozen of other providers did them a favor by providing them with the free software pieces they relied on to build their product.
Of course it's poor taste to add the "You're welcome". But poor taste is par for the course for such startup, unfortunately.
I meant it in a broader sense. Even for paid products, corporations view themselves as doing customers a favor. That's the sort of antagonistic relationship they define.
Despite interesting legal definitions, companies are just groups of people.
I also read the title as having an air of self-importance or maybe passive-aggression. If you read it a little more dispassionately then it's just an awkward way of stating that this is a gift.
Why is this a gift? The company does not need to give it to you, though it arguably benefits from doing so. It did so with some definition of "free."
I looked at the dependencies and noticed that it wasn’t using an existing Protobuf parser which means they reimplemented the parser from scratch. Perhaps due to a lack of error recovery in the existing implementations? I don’t have the energy right now for further inspection.
It is definitely best to reuse the parser for the runtime when implementing an LSP but to do so properly means implementing the parser itself as a standalone library. Even better is shipping the semantic analysis as well!
Implementation drift is definitely an issue.
But great project anyways, just wanted to put my thoughts on the matter into the conversation!
It absolutely can be done [1] but it is a lot of effort to do high quality error recovery. It's easier in languages with natural "synchronization points" [2], harder in languages which don't have them.
Having built a lot of protobuf tooling, I'd estimate that protobuf largely falls into the former camp; most of your time working with .proto files is operating on fields which terminate using `;` at the end of the line (though multi-line is also possible).
Adding to this, rustc's parser is both correct and fault-tolerant, yet rust-analyzer ended up building its own for different reasons (needing a CST and not an AST).
I settled on starting with a CST using rowan, doing semantic analysis, having an agnostic editor services, exposing both an LSP interface with tower, and a WASM interface (for Monaco in the browser [non-LSP!!]) and having the runtime binary doing the interpretation/compilation with the same pathway, with a slight jog, as the editor services. Phew!
It is my understanding that basically all LSP implementations use tree-sitter because of its incremental rebuild capability, and this requires re-implementing the parser.
That's just not true. rust-analyzer does not use tree-sitter. Neither does gopls. Nor Pylance. Or tsc. In fact I don't know if there is a single popular LSP that uses it (but there probably is).
Many editors use tree-sitter, but that is separate from the LSP.
Lots of naysayers here, but an advantage of protobuf is that proto files are hand-writeable, and therefore having an LSP for that could be useful.
That said, proto itself dissuades or forbids the kind of common things you might do with a LSP, such as renaming.
Renaming fields is a big no-no [edit: this isn't true, see corrections below], as is doing things like re-ordering fields.
A core idea of proto is that versions are strictly compatible with with previous versions. This itself has limitations and challenges for migrations, but encourages good practice about compatibility that usually gets ignored or hand-waved away in most ecosystems.
I accept however that it's often easy to offload both the re-structuring and the checking of version compatibility to an LLM and let them go at it.
Renaming is forbidden though (because JSON and textproto). In Google, it's a documented antipattern to try to make protobuf look "nice" by changing field indices, rearranging fields, etc. — the common ground is that it's better to not do it.
As long as you know the use cases of your fields, renaming is just fine. My team regularly does it. We also maintain our own serializer and deserializer json, XML, and fixed with formats. The json one we handle serialization using an annotation to say how it should be exported.
Of course, the whole concept of a breaking change does not really apply if all usage is within the controlled code. The problems start to appear when you have external users with old versions; then protobuf starts having a bunch of weird limitations. My favorite is that it's forbidden to move a field into or out of a `oneof`: it's a compatible change in a sense of wire format and JSON, but breaks the generated Golang code.
Breaking changes matter even with controlled code, because you can have requests that straddle upgrade boundaries, it's fiction to believe that all services are upgraded at the same moment, and pretending that is the case is the sort of thing that leads to quiet data corruption or mysterious bugs that can never seem to get reproduced.
Even if you upgrade with coordinated downtime across your entire service stack ( a bit old-school, but still happens more than you might imagine. ), then you still have to occasionally deal with requests that get persisted somewhere, possibly for support purposes, and it's much handier if the wire format remains compatible, at least between immediate versions.
While not a direct competitor to protobufs, if you are working in the video game space where struct versioning is not needed, there is an alternative language called "schema" that supports C, C++, C#, Golang, Rust and JavaScript.
Multiplayer games typically deploy both client and server at the same time, and refuse to connect a client if it doesn't speak the exact same protocol as the server.
Thus all the versioning overhead of protobufs is not needed for this wire protocol.
(Yes, games still use versioning everywhere else where it makes sense: save games, asset data, config etc...)
You can do this but if it's too granular (like you have no concept of version compatibility) then it can heavily split your matchmaking.
Plus the headaches of keeping many out of date builds up to date enough to deploy.
Even if you don't care about in game compatibility, all your servers still talk to some centralized data store and that will likely want a single deploy that handles old clients
The promise of Protobuf/gRPC for seamless communication across tech stacks just wasn't delivered. Third party projects like Buf or BetterProto for Python try their best but it's still a nightmare trying to integrate with gRPC from something remotely modern, like Python with uv and async/await. Plus there's a lot of little pains like not being human-readable, always requiring HTTP/2 and thus HTTPS, and so on.
JSON isn't "optimal" but after transfer compression it's not that bad, and the support for JSON Schema is much better across the stacks I use, e.g. Zod in JS/TS, Pydantic in Python, etc. And it's fully usable "by hand" without having the schema, for one-off scripts and such -- compare with Protobuf where you need the full definition to even parse a chunk of data.
In the web dev world, I’ve noticed there are a lot of people who think that JSON is the ultimate modern data format. Typically those same people have barely heard of JSON Schema.
This has been driving me crazy ever since I started using protobuf/grpc and realized more major tech companies (in the cloud/infra/data world at least, and a lot of other SAAS) were using it or something similar (eg capn proto) internally than not.
It feels like we’re in some sort of deadlock where each of them think “proto/grpc are too niche to support for external users, better just use JSON”, keeping it unfamiliar for an Average Web Developer. But if every company using it just exposed it to third parties/added it to their public APIs, it would immediately be common (and trendy) enough for every web developer to learn it and start using it.
If Google added the missing HTTP/2 streaming support to browsers (blocking native bidi grpc streaming) it would have an instant killer app in making it easier to implement websocket-like client/server applications. It makes absolutely no sense that full duplex bidi was added to the HTTP/2 but remains unimplemented in browsers.
The role MCP, OpenAPI, and JSON schema fill all would be a million times simpler if they were based on protobuf instead of JSON. I can forgive OpenAPI/JSON but it honestly pisses me off that we ended up with MCP and JSON-RPC + JSON schema, and people think these are cool/good tools, and actively adopting them. Just piling on the slop
I pushed for us to adopt this setup at my previous company and it was wildly successful. I thought frontend devs would resist but they absolutely loved the generated types and clients. It quickly seemed silly to do anything else.
This is the way! It's great to just point frontend developers to the Buf documentation for new features and they easily have all the types and generated clients available in their projects too.
Unpopular opinion -- LSPs are bad because they introduce latency into coding. For every keystroke, my IDE needs to make request/response with LSP, instead of using its own internal parser/colorer/autocomplete.
You can just not use an LSP? My understanding is that LSPs aren't made to be the fastest (code completion|syntax highlighter|code analysis), but easily integrated into all sorts of IDEs/text editors.
As far as I understand, IDEs ara way less eager to spend resources onto their own integration if there's an LSP. E.g. last time I tried to code in Zig there was either LSP or nothing.
Protobuf was never particularly a Java thing. You could more accurately say it was a C++ thing. It was initially developed in C++, and used mainly in C++ services at Google. The implementation and early ecosystem were C++-centric.
Later, Go became one of the major Protobuf ecosystems, and today it would be understandable to think it was a Go thing.
For me that is how I know something like protobuf is good. It is a nuisance to manage and distribute the definitions, adds a build step even to languages with no build step normally, is slower than almost every alternative, and artificially restricts you from doing lots of common things. It's so good!
And look at the code quality of the implementation! It's like a team of interns wrote it while drunk. It is a complete spaghetti mess, but has tons of super convoluted micro optimizations that are slower than just doing the most obvious thing, but make the implementation confusing and indirect. It's trash code.
What are good alternatives when you need a common "single source of truth" schema shared between multiple languages? We use protobuf between c# and Python.
I quite like the look of Typespec though I haven't used it much.
I always thought Thrift was waaay better than any of the alternatives, but it always had terrible documentation and I think it died mainly because of that.
The goal is not to have a single source of truth schema. That is a means to some other goal, and it's not even a good means.
If you never change the schema then you don't have to worry about it, get things working and never look back.
If you do change your schema from time to time, you need testing between the two systems. If you have good tests again a single source of truth is fully redundant, both systems are talking just fine. If you don't have tests things can and will break all the time even using protobuf.
> The goal is not to have a single source of truth schema. That is a means to some other goal, and it's not even a good means.
It’s about data transmission. Being able to encode and decode in a type safe manner between different languages (and so, different platforms) is a goal that makes a lot of sense.
> If you do change your schema from time to time, you need testing between the two systems
Or you could just use a defined format that doesn’t require testing. I rarely use protobuf but I can see why people do. The guaranteed backwards compatibility is huge for people who can’t just publish a new web frontend at the drop of a hat.
If you understand how to evolve protobuf schema definitions, then you don’t really need testing. You instinctively know how the parser works when it is parsing data with a different schema from what it expects. And that’s a powerful thing. If your things break even when using protobuf then you don’t grok protobuf.
It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that being able to avoid tests between different systems who have different versions of the schema is a core goal of protobuf. Why? These two different systems are probably owned by different teams, and introducing explicit tests between different versions of them increases coupling between them.
Protobuf only allows you to add optional fields after the initial version, right? Because otherwise it would not be backwards compatible. Protobuf does not allow you to define contingent logic between fields. Optional fields are always nullable (or you must provide a default). This forces you to know all of this and use a method to see if it was actually set or just defaulted. So you have a ton of nullable/defaulted fields that likely are required to be filled in or not filled in, contingent on other values in the same struct. For example if the charge type is "purchase" then price must be not null and > 0. That sort of thing. This is so common you should just assume your app has a million little rules like this that are assumed. Protobuf does not help you here at all. You need some other logic to validate the data on top of protobuf. once you have that anyway protobuf's value is that it's expensive, requires build steps, is actually not fast, and forces you to distribute the schema between different apps somehow.
If it's not obvious yet, lets say you are sending your charge structs and you have a bug where sometimes you don't set price. It's defaulted to 0 or -1 or whatever nonsense value the default is, or null, it doesn't matter it's not correct sometimes. That is why you need tests my guy. Protobuf can't fix this. If you use json the tests make sure everything protobuf does for you is done too. In a world where you have to write tests because protobuf can't force you to correctly set fields, you have tests already, and protobuf didn't help you at all. Whether you call it tests or input validation or whatever, protobuf definitions are insufficient, and when you have what is sufficient it 100% covers everything protobuf does 'for you'.
If you don't get it at this point then lets just agree that you will never get it.
> Protobuf only allows you to add optional fields after the initial version, right?
That’s not all. For example, you can also change fields from optional to repeated or vice versa. For another example, you can also delete fields.
> Protobuf does not allow you to define contingent logic between fields.
You are just saying that protobuf is not a data validation library. That’s true; it only handles data serialization. You need to write validations yourself. And you will most likely need tests to test your validation code. But those are entirely tests within a single process; they are not tests involving a producer and a consumer of a protobuf message, which is the wrong kind of tests.
> For example if the charge type is "purchase" then price must be not null and > 0. That sort of thing.
That sort of thing sounds like you are not using `oneof` appropriately. The charge type shouldn’t be a field. It should be a submessage called Purchase.
You don’t get what they say. It’s not about about how efficient it is after encode, it’s about how fast encode is. They are not spewing bs, they’re focusing on a single point. The question is: do you send it over the wite more often than performing encode/decode.
That's what the person you replied to is talking about, and they're right. Putting aside the final byte size (where protobuf also wins), protobuf is faster at both encoding and decoding than json. There are numerous benchmarks you can find that show this.
The advantages of json are not related to performance.
If you're writing JS you cannot beat JSON.parse, because you're running the most optimized C++ implementation of JSON which will outcompete any decoder written JS itself.
It is generally correct. When both implementations are completely in the same language Protobuf will win. Instead of a pure-JS implementation one can also make a FFI module for Protobuf.
The comparison that's being made is equivalent to implementing quick sort in Python and bubble sort in C++ and then declaring bubble sort is the better alternative.
Anyone with a healthy understading of computer science and programming experience will not make bullshit claims like that.
No, protobuf is not faster, not on Python, because google's implementation is poor. Python is the #1 language in the world right now. Don't use protobuf.
Buf's offering of protobuf registries and codegen SDKs for microservices seems less necessary in the LLM era.
I'm starting to question many of protobuf's advantages (perhaps not the wire format). Add to that monorepos and other fads of the 2010s given the rise of LLMs.
I used to be a big believer in this stuff, but I'm quickly having my core assumptions change out from under me.
A big differentiator is whether one imagines an LLM in-band with most/all future software. If there is, and we’re deferring until very late parts of a program that world have been load bearing, and we’re able to programmatically ands reliably squint and say “eh i know what you meant” … then yeah formalizations seem superfluous-to-counterproductive.
OTOH if LLMs are to write, but not supplant, much of software, then boundaries, delegation to deterministic layers, good compilers to bonk miscreant models on the head with error message seem essential.
At one point it would have been shocking to assert that the compiler would live in-band with the program too. and yet JS eats the world. It seems shocking today that we could have a universal prior over the world operating in the ms/us nJ/pJ range required. And yet … ?
The real argument shouldn't be about protocols becoming obsolete, but programming languages that are "less efficient" could eventually become obsolete in favor of highly scalable and performant languages due to LLMs when the main gap becomes knowing how the tech works at a high level, and not the syntax, why code in one language over another if you don't need to worry about messing up on syntax, only about reviewing logic for sanity and correctness against business rules as well as validating that it is stable code.
Anybody who thinks that you can just chuck unstructured data into LLM and YOLO the app is an idiot.
This works up to a point, and then it doesn't. And you're left with tons of inconsistently formatted data.
My company is built on protobufs from ground up :) We use it in the database, for remote calls, on the frontend, etc. The protobuf language is not great, but it's about the right balance between too expressive and too restricting.
And the best thing is that it's compact, compared to OpenAPI.
I feel exactly that way about REST. The assumption that LLMs make schemas obsolete misses how structured outputs actually work in production. When you have probabilistic models generating code, strict contracts become more critical, not less. It is no coincidence that several major LLM platforms rely on ConnectRPC and Protobuf for their own APIs.
You're right, but the adeptness of models to spin up clients and behaviors on the fly is remarkable. They're capturing the semantics of behavior at a deeper level.
If we do strict schemas, I'd like to see less ceremony around them. Tool calls instead of brittle build steps and protocol registries.
Hm... Maybe. In my view, an IDL is part of the input that you absolutely want humans to author or carefully review at least. In my experience, the ceremony around generating code is also performed very well by LLMs. But I do agree, there's definitely some changes that are needed to integrate Protobufs better. Some languages have built-in tooling to make it seamless, but it's definitely not universal.
That's not Google. Buf.build is, hilariously enough, a completely separate company that tries to make sense of Google's protobuf, and it's doing a decent job from what I can see.
They reluctantly acknowledged that as a mistake by adding an actual "optional" modifier for field presence. proto3's previously so-called optional were really all present with a zero default value; proto2 could have supported that for required fields at the code level if they had wanted. In the end, all they've changed is how they frame the feature.
Aren't LSP dying (and eventually IDE, at least in their current form) as everybody use LLM to code. I know some big tech companies redirected teams supporting them to new efforts (ie. tool integration with AI).
Weird post. I built IntelliJ protobuf support [1] while at Google like 10 years ago, and it started shipping by default with IntelliJ in ~2021. Maybe that's not considered "modern".
[1] https://github.com/jvolkman/intellij-protobuf-editor
It's a bit odd for the parent commenter to say "Weird post" and implying that having an editor specific feature would somehow make having an LSP that works for everyone be any less interesting.
Probably the author
> Edit: In full transparency, this blog post was originally titled "Protobuf finally has LSP support. You're Welcome." We thought this might generate some interest, but unfortunately this post sat unloved for months. Then, out of the blue, this post decided to make front page HN, and we received some choice feedback on our use of "You're Welcome" and our poor comedic abilities. Fair enough, we appreciate you speaking up - and we of course *thank you* for your continued support of our work!
I, personally, enjoy Buf. It has solved many frustrations I've had with The Way it was previously done, manually installing protoc plugins, writing arcane flags into scripts nobody wants to touch, working around various quirks, like how protoc produces different output based on which directory you invoke it in, et cetera... I don't quite like the remote plugin model and rate limiting, but using local plugins is easy enough that it doesn't matter.
Buf has made my life easier, and I've actually been using `buf_ls` for a while now in NeoVim. I understand where the criticism of the title comes from, but I don't personally feel it in this particular case. In fact, I didn't even notice it.
I don't even mind the monetized properietary cloud thing, as long as Buf CLI and the related toolchain remains free software, serving the community. Hope you won't do the ol' switcharoo any time soon.
And the Buf CLI will always be free and OSS, don't worry!
It can be hard for some people to navigate the nuances between usage of a tongue-in-cheek usage of the phrase which is more socially acceptable or humorous from the version that reads as arrogant
Test for yourself: next time you take out the garbage, loudly tell your partner or roommate, “I took out the garbage. You’re welcome.”
Try this instead: give a stranger a piece of pre-chewed gum and say “you’re welcome!” Hell, even if it’s not pre-chewed, it’s just presumptuous and rude. You have no idea if they value it or not. They might not even like it.
Even if my barista handed me the coffee I ordered and said “you’re welcome” before I thanked them first, I’d think they’re a little off kilter.
> Even if my barista handed me the coffee I ordered and said “you’re welcome” before I thanked them first, I’d think they’re a little off kilter.
Jeez...
But also that's a conversation where you can thank them first. That part isn't applicable to a post like this.
That exists.
> in exactly the kind of context the OP article uses it
I do not agree.
Social condemnation has always been used to help keep the behavior of a group within certain acceptable bounds. Whether it's as effective in today's world of ever-escalating attention-seeking competition as it once was is questionable, though.
> Getting worked up is exactly the goal.
I don’t know who you think is worked up here, but it’s not me. I was merely expressing what impression the author’s choice of words left on me. And clearly I wasn’t alone in that regard. You are the one who chose to attack me as “projecting.”
...
You are getting a lot of feedback that you are the one who is mistaken here. Have you considered digesting it instead of defensively escalating?
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2f/3c/dd/2f3cddbe0d3b383ee6d3...
Have you ever tried to shame a narcissist, or someone with BPD? It definitely does not work on them. They just try to destroy your life for you. The way to deal with that sort is, don’t deal with them at all. Give them nothing until they get bored and leave. If you count it all up there’s rather a lot of people for whom making it your job to control them is a bad outcome for everyone involved. It’s a generalization that has important exceptions.
I disagree with your characterization, but you do you, I guess.
> There are better things to be doing with your day.
Perhaps so. There are probably better things for everyone on HN to be doing instead. Nevertheless, as autonomous people, we can choose our own priorities. I, for one, don't appreciate being told how to spend my time.
> Have you ever tried to shame a narcissist, or someone with BPD? It definitely does not work on them.
To be sure, a punch in the mouth may be more effective.
HAH! Not all of us are big enough to get away with it, but you're not wrong.
Well, also there's been a lot of feedback on both sides. I wasn't the first one to suggest that the rabble rousing was misplaced here. So, I guess we are both guilty of ignoring feedback.
I mean, the only person these descriptions apply to in this discussion is you.
Google's blog title is weird. Every normal human being that speaks English will find it weird. Maybe the author is on the spectrum, or maybe they thought their humour would carry better in a technical blog. Your agreement with this is not at all our concern.
Maybe you should go outside and settle down?
Try my experiments yourself if you disagree, and come back and let us all know how they went for you.
If this doesn't make sense to you, I'm not sure there's much anyone can do to convince you, because it's purely social convention. It's certainly possible that the author didn't realize it either, but having to deal with reactions about word choice when putting out writing explicitly for public consumption kinda comes with the territory.
This goes for Hacker News comments too of course, but as someone with no horse in this race, your interference about their word choice seems like much more of a stretch than theirs about the author. Not recognizing that a title to a blog post will evoke a negative reactions in a lot of readers does genuinely seem like information about the author socially in a way that having that common negative reaction does not.
The social convention is for conversations.
Of course it's poor taste to add the "You're welcome". But poor taste is par for the course for such startup, unfortunately.
I also read the title as having an air of self-importance or maybe passive-aggression. If you read it a little more dispassionately then it's just an awkward way of stating that this is a gift.
Why is this a gift? The company does not need to give it to you, though it arguably benefits from doing so. It did so with some definition of "free."
It is definitely best to reuse the parser for the runtime when implementing an LSP but to do so properly means implementing the parser itself as a standalone library. Even better is shipping the semantic analysis as well!
Implementation drift is definitely an issue.
But great project anyways, just wanted to put my thoughts on the matter into the conversation!
A language parser should be correct. A LSP parser should be fault tolerant. My understanding is you cant have both.
Having built a lot of protobuf tooling, I'd estimate that protobuf largely falls into the former camp; most of your time working with .proto files is operating on fields which terminate using `;` at the end of the line (though multi-line is also possible).
[1] source: I've done it for SQLite SQL at https://github.com/LalitMaganti/syntaqlite/
[2] e.g. SQL naturally has this at statement and expression boundaries which covers almost all of the cases people care about.
Many editors use tree-sitter, but that is separate from the LSP.
That said, proto itself dissuades or forbids the kind of common things you might do with a LSP, such as renaming.
Renaming fields is a big no-no [edit: this isn't true, see corrections below], as is doing things like re-ordering fields.
A core idea of proto is that versions are strictly compatible with with previous versions. This itself has limitations and challenges for migrations, but encourages good practice about compatibility that usually gets ignored or hand-waved away in most ecosystems.
I accept however that it's often easy to offload both the re-structuring and the checking of version compatibility to an LLM and let them go at it.
Reordering fields without changing their ID is indeed a non-breaking change from what I understand, albeit quite a useless one :)
If you have a (long) list of fields and you want to keep them lexicographically sorted, being able to reorder is quite useful if you rename a field.
Even if you upgrade with coordinated downtime across your entire service stack ( a bit old-school, but still happens more than you might imagine. ), then you still have to occasionally deal with requests that get persisted somewhere, possibly for support purposes, and it's much handier if the wire format remains compatible, at least between immediate versions.
There was definitely one that kept tripping up the checks and it was something people like to do.
https://github.com/mas-bandwidth/schema
Save files? Looser than exact version multiplayer?
Thus all the versioning overhead of protobufs is not needed for this wire protocol.
(Yes, games still use versioning everywhere else where it makes sense: save games, asset data, config etc...)
But then again, those barely count as games, I guess.
Plus the headaches of keeping many out of date builds up to date enough to deploy.
Even if you don't care about in game compatibility, all your servers still talk to some centralized data store and that will likely want a single deploy that handles old clients
JSON isn't "optimal" but after transfer compression it's not that bad, and the support for JSON Schema is much better across the stacks I use, e.g. Zod in JS/TS, Pydantic in Python, etc. And it's fully usable "by hand" without having the schema, for one-off scripts and such -- compare with Protobuf where you need the full definition to even parse a chunk of data.
It feels like we’re in some sort of deadlock where each of them think “proto/grpc are too niche to support for external users, better just use JSON”, keeping it unfamiliar for an Average Web Developer. But if every company using it just exposed it to third parties/added it to their public APIs, it would immediately be common (and trendy) enough for every web developer to learn it and start using it.
If Google added the missing HTTP/2 streaming support to browsers (blocking native bidi grpc streaming) it would have an instant killer app in making it easier to implement websocket-like client/server applications. It makes absolutely no sense that full duplex bidi was added to the HTTP/2 but remains unimplemented in browsers.
The role MCP, OpenAPI, and JSON schema fill all would be a million times simpler if they were based on protobuf instead of JSON. I can forgive OpenAPI/JSON but it honestly pisses me off that we ended up with MCP and JSON-RPC + JSON schema, and people think these are cool/good tools, and actively adopting them. Just piling on the slop
Even my little chromebook can provide completions and errors effectively instantly to me, even in medium sized rust projects.
Or are you saying (probably maximum) ~20ms delay is blocking your ability to code?
96GB RAM, 12 vCPU, Linux, desktop.
It worked great in Java, but not so well in JS, especially with Kafka.
Later, Go became one of the major Protobuf ecosystems, and today it would be understandable to think it was a Go thing.
....
Tada!
If you patch clients to google services in Python to use json instead of grpc they get faster and more reliable. A lot faster. Benchmark it!
For me that is how I know something like protobuf is good. It is a nuisance to manage and distribute the definitions, adds a build step even to languages with no build step normally, is slower than almost every alternative, and artificially restricts you from doing lots of common things. It's so good!And look at the code quality of the implementation! It's like a team of interns wrote it while drunk. It is a complete spaghetti mess, but has tons of super convoluted micro optimizations that are slower than just doing the most obvious thing, but make the implementation confusing and indirect. It's trash code.
I always thought Thrift was waaay better than any of the alternatives, but it always had terrible documentation and I think it died mainly because of that.
If you never change the schema then you don't have to worry about it, get things working and never look back.
If you do change your schema from time to time, you need testing between the two systems. If you have good tests again a single source of truth is fully redundant, both systems are talking just fine. If you don't have tests things can and will break all the time even using protobuf.
It’s about data transmission. Being able to encode and decode in a type safe manner between different languages (and so, different platforms) is a goal that makes a lot of sense.
> If you do change your schema from time to time, you need testing between the two systems
Or you could just use a defined format that doesn’t require testing. I rarely use protobuf but I can see why people do. The guaranteed backwards compatibility is huge for people who can’t just publish a new web frontend at the drop of a hat.
It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that being able to avoid tests between different systems who have different versions of the schema is a core goal of protobuf. Why? These two different systems are probably owned by different teams, and introducing explicit tests between different versions of them increases coupling between them.
Protobuf only allows you to add optional fields after the initial version, right? Because otherwise it would not be backwards compatible. Protobuf does not allow you to define contingent logic between fields. Optional fields are always nullable (or you must provide a default). This forces you to know all of this and use a method to see if it was actually set or just defaulted. So you have a ton of nullable/defaulted fields that likely are required to be filled in or not filled in, contingent on other values in the same struct. For example if the charge type is "purchase" then price must be not null and > 0. That sort of thing. This is so common you should just assume your app has a million little rules like this that are assumed. Protobuf does not help you here at all. You need some other logic to validate the data on top of protobuf. once you have that anyway protobuf's value is that it's expensive, requires build steps, is actually not fast, and forces you to distribute the schema between different apps somehow.
If it's not obvious yet, lets say you are sending your charge structs and you have a bug where sometimes you don't set price. It's defaulted to 0 or -1 or whatever nonsense value the default is, or null, it doesn't matter it's not correct sometimes. That is why you need tests my guy. Protobuf can't fix this. If you use json the tests make sure everything protobuf does for you is done too. In a world where you have to write tests because protobuf can't force you to correctly set fields, you have tests already, and protobuf didn't help you at all. Whether you call it tests or input validation or whatever, protobuf definitions are insufficient, and when you have what is sufficient it 100% covers everything protobuf does 'for you'.
If you don't get it at this point then lets just agree that you will never get it.
That’s not all. For example, you can also change fields from optional to repeated or vice versa. For another example, you can also delete fields.
> Protobuf does not allow you to define contingent logic between fields.
You are just saying that protobuf is not a data validation library. That’s true; it only handles data serialization. You need to write validations yourself. And you will most likely need tests to test your validation code. But those are entirely tests within a single process; they are not tests involving a producer and a consumer of a protobuf message, which is the wrong kind of tests.
> For example if the charge type is "purchase" then price must be not null and > 0. That sort of thing.
That sort of thing sounds like you are not using `oneof` appropriately. The charge type shouldn’t be a field. It should be a submessage called Purchase.
The advantages of json are not related to performance.
Which is not a very generalizable situation.
The comparison that's being made is equivalent to implementing quick sort in Python and bubble sort in C++ and then declaring bubble sort is the better alternative.
Anyone with a healthy understading of computer science and programming experience will not make bullshit claims like that.
I'm starting to question many of protobuf's advantages (perhaps not the wire format). Add to that monorepos and other fads of the 2010s given the rise of LLMs.
I used to be a big believer in this stuff, but I'm quickly having my core assumptions change out from under me.
OTOH if LLMs are to write, but not supplant, much of software, then boundaries, delegation to deterministic layers, good compilers to bonk miscreant models on the head with error message seem essential.
At one point it would have been shocking to assert that the compiler would live in-band with the program too. and yet JS eats the world. It seems shocking today that we could have a universal prior over the world operating in the ms/us nJ/pJ range required. And yet … ?
This works up to a point, and then it doesn't. And you're left with tons of inconsistently formatted data.
My company is built on protobufs from ground up :) We use it in the database, for remote calls, on the frontend, etc. The protobuf language is not great, but it's about the right balance between too expressive and too restricting.
And the best thing is that it's compact, compared to OpenAPI.
If we do strict schemas, I'd like to see less ceremony around them. Tool calls instead of brittle build steps and protocol registries.
Perhaps we need new tools for this going forward.