[kentonv]

FWIW, Protobuf has now been open source for a decade and has been used for basically everything inside Google since about the turn of the century. Protobuf predates JSON, and I would wager that, worldwide, much more data is stored in Protobuf format and many more cycles are spent parsing Protobuf format than JSON. For Protobuf to die out, Google itself would have to die, as would quite a few other companies that heavily rely on it. It doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

I unfortunately am not in a position to make such strong statements about Cap'n Proto. However, implementations exist in C++, Java, JavaScript, Rust, Go, Python, and a bunch of other languages, so it should at least be much easier to deal with than Qt serialization.

(Disclosure: I'm the author of Cap'n Proto and of the first open source release of Protobuf.)

[nostrademons]

To be fair, DEC was once in the same position as Google; in fact, by employee count, it was twice as big (140k vs. 70k) and by market share of the whole computing market (you could speak of a "computing market" back then), it was significantly larger. In the mid-80s, the idea that a VAX might be supplanted by a massive worldwide computation network of billions of computing devices would've seemed like science fiction. (Note that at its peak, Digital had only sold 400,000 VAX.) You could be fairly confident that storing your data in the OpenVMS filesystem would be fairly future-proof.

When was the last time you saw a filename of the form NODE"accountname password"::device:[directory.subdirectory]filename.type;ver?