[jsheard]

Even if protobuf isn't your preferred serializer, having any tight binary format be the standard across the ecosystem is miles better than everything slinging JSON around.

Lord knows how much energy we are wasting turning binary data into human readable text that no human will ever look at before it's parsed back into binary.

[hot_gril]

Performance aside, it's also really nice how a protobuf spec tells you what data structure to expect ahead of time for an API.

[jon_richards]

The number of APIs with a single JSON example as the only documentation is... unfortunate. Especially if you want to know if a field is nullable.

[mf192]

Taking this a bit further, it's surprising how many companies sell API as a service but provide minimal support for that API, publishing like 1 client/sdk (and often not in the language you need, lol).

Just mindblowing that companies don't adopt a schema-first approach to appeal to a broader customer base. I've lost count of the number of hnd rolled clients I've had to write over the years.

It gets even better if the API itself is backed by some RPC framework. With that, users can simply generate a client and get going.

It feels like we can do better as an industry, this cracked me up because it's so true.

"a single JSON example as the only documentation is... unfortunate"

[hot_gril]

Funny you should mention nullability. That was a big debate in proto2 vs proto3.

[wbl]

XDR was already a core part of NFS. And then there was a DEC alternative also.