[hot_gril]

If both lat and lon are required, you don't need to throw an exception for lat=0. If you want lat=null lon=0.0 to mean something like "latitude is unknown but longitude is known to be 0.0," yeah you need optional or wrapped primitives.

Edit: If a client doesn't fill out the LatLng message, that's different from lat and/or lon being null or 0. The whole LatLng message itself will be null. Proto3 always supported that too. But it's usually overkill to check the message being null, unless you added it later and need to specially deal with clients predating that change. If the client just has a bug preventing it from filling out LatLng, that's the client's problem.

The confusing part here is that even if the LatLng message is null, LatLng.lat will return 0 in some proto libraries, depending on the language. You have to specifically check if the message is null if you care. But there are enough cases where you have tons of nested protos and the 0-default behavior is actually way more convenient.

[sebastos]

Yeah - I think what I'm getting at though is that you want to guard against situations where somebody accidentally doesn't set one of the fields, and yet 0 is a valid value to set on that field. You could accidentally forget to fill in latitude, and that would be bad news.

Def +1 the confusingness of how you have to explicitly check for has_latlon() to make sure you're not just getting default values of a non-existent LatLon message. The asymmetry between primitive and message-type fields in having explicit presence checking is also part of my beef. It's weird to have to teach junior devs that you can do has_* checks, but only for messages.

[hot_gril]

It's safer in a way to guard against these situations, but it seems like they don't intend you to do that often because there are more downsides outweighing it. Proto2 had the "required" feature that had its own issues. Our team trusts to some degree that the user actually read the API spec, and so far it's been ok.

I can imagine message nullness being clearer in languages with optional unwrapping like JS. Like foo.bar.baz gives an error if bar is null, and if you want default-0 you use foo.bar?.baz. Idk if that's what happens though.