[jhumphries131]

Our aim is to make the spec accurately match Google's reference compiler -- for as long as that is the source of truth, which is hopefully not forever :)

Even for those not using Buf, we expect this documentation to be of interest to the community as it describes a large number of facets of protoc that were previously undocumented (and required examining the source for protoc or playing around with test source code to see what it expects and what descriptors it generates).

If issues are found with this spec, it is true that we'll most likely have to revise the spec to match the compiler, not the other way around. But no software is perfect: some variations will be due to bugs in protoc, which can be fixed in the compiler to properly match the spec. Over time, we'd love to see an outcome where a formal specification is the source of truth.

For now, our commitment is to make (and keep) this spec as accurate as possible to describe the Protobuf language, not some Buf dialect.