[ithkuil]

You make it sound like protobuf was invented yesterday. Sure it's not so old like ASN.1 but protobuf now about a quarter century old and battle tested as the main interchange format for at least one giant company with gazillions of projects that needed to interoperate.

One of the design requirements was simplicity and ease of implementation and for all the love in the world I can muster for ASN.1 I must admit it's far from simple.

IIRC complete and open implementations of ASN.1 were/are rare and the matrix of covered features didn't quite overlap between languages.

[cryptonector]

A subset of ASN.1 can be simple enough. There was no need to re-invent the wheel, and to do it badly.

> IIRC complete and open implementations of ASN.1 were/are rare and the matrix of covered features didn't quite overlap between languages.

When protobufs was designed there were zero protobufs implementations.