[no_circuit]

I fail to see how running something like protoc before running or compiling code is a show stopper. There are even npm packages that will install protoc for you [1]. That means you can use it in a custom npm build script action, or invoke it before staring the dev server? Put in a git pre-commit to run it to assert there are no changes? Run via a file-watcher?

IMO writing a schema in something like JSON for OpenAPI is way more verbose and time consuming than writing a proto file and a script or Makefile to invoke protoc. There also is the mismatch in capabilities. The JS-adjacent schema standards mostly do not directly support native types like uint64, let alone directly specify how to encode numbers like fixed64. I mean, look... the work around in JavaScript still is use "string" [2].

On the other hand, there is a standard in OpenAPI for validating values. But that doesn't make sense in the Protobuf world since usually the API is expected to be forward and backward compatible, within reason, so something like a min and max value needs to be done at runtime, and not fixed within the schema. And don't get me started on trying to define cross-field validation in a declarative schema. It is easier to just write the code. :-)

So, IMO, no, a single standard won't happen in the industry. The many dimensions like logical vs physical models, validation, or error handling that make it impossible.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@protobuf-ts/protoc [2] https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/issues/2617#iss...