[xyzzyz]

I agree. Preserving unknowns fortunately was recognized as mistake, and fixed in some more recent version, and presence can be worked around: it is still preserved for message types, so you only need to wrap your primitives into objects[1], Java style.

[1] - https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/referenc...

[lonelappde]

That's not "agree" with "not preserving unknowns was also wrong."

[xyzzyz]

Sorry, I meant not preserving unknowns was also wrong. Proto2 did preserve them, then proto3 didn’t, and then they realized it was a bad idea and went back to preserving them.