[stefan_]

It really isn't. It's like someone wanted to add protobufs for kernel interfaces, but everything has not one tenth of the usability. In fact it's the kind of thing someone would design who wanted to make it's use in C maximally painful and error prone.

[eqvinox]

Working with both netlink and protobufs in C for 10+ years, I gotta say the latter is much more painful than the former. Error prone I would agree though, mostly because it's too easy to implement netlink… and get it wrong in the process.

NB: my experience specifically relates to C. Protobuf's bindings to other languages are better.