[difflens]

Perhaps I don't understand their use case fully, but it seems to me that every schema can be defined as a child protobuf message, and each child can then be added to a oneof field of a parent protobuf message. This way, you get the strict/optional type checks that are required, and the efficiency and ecosystem around protobufs.

[mccanne]

Author here. This totally makes sense. The challenge here is you need to store the type definitions somewhere (e.g., in the .proto files) and any system that processes protocol buffers needs to know which proto to apply to which messages. The theme of super-structured data is that this type structure should be native to the serialized data and our premise is this leads to better DX (though Zed is early and the jury is out). Perhaps flexbuffers is a closer analogy, which I should have mentioned in the article.