[paulddraper]

Protobufs are pretty good.

Sure, there's things that can be improved, but years later they are still the most ubiquitous binary message format.

[makeitdouble]

The only other binary message format I saw were flat files with fixed bytes length fields, dtp/sftp in legacy banking systems. And many moved to first csv, then json/xml wherever they could.

I feel there's no one trying to take that crown really.

[paulddraper]

BSON, Thrift, Avro, MessagePack, FlatBuffers, Capn Proto

[cmrdporcupine]

ASN.1 wants to have a word with you!

[candiodari]

Glad that someone else noticed that protobufs are very close to a carbon copy of ASN.1. If you don't have the .proto file you even see the .1.3.6.1.2.1 paths in protobuf files, just like you do without .mib files.

Even the integer encoding and tooling is very similar, just not quite identical.

[makeitdouble]

Thanks, this was a nice rabbit hole to fall into.