[thadt]

Perhaps surprisingly, I think microcontrollers may be a place where Protobufs are not a bad fit. Using something like Nanopb [1] gives you the size/speed/flexibility advantages of protocol buffers without being too heavyweight. It’ll be a bit slower than your custom binary protocol, but it comes with quite a few advantages, depending on the context.

[1] https://github.com/nanopb/nanopb

[ajross]

We carry a nanopb integration in Zephyr. And even there... meh. It's true that there are some really bad binary protocols in the embedded world. And protobufs are for sure a step up from a median command parser or whatever. And they have real size advantages vs. JSON for tiny/sub-megabyte devices, which is real.

But even there, I find that really these are very big machines in a historical sense. And text parsing is really not that hard, or that big. The first HTTP server was on a 25MHz 68040!

Just use JSON. Anything else in the modern world needs to be presumed to be premature optimization absent a solid analysis with numbers.

[imtringued]

If you use JSON in an embedded capacity and you're stingy with your bytes, you can just send arrays as your main document.

There was this one MMO I played, where every packet was just a space separated string, with a fancy variable length number encoding that let them store two digits in a single character.

There is not much difference between

    walk <PlayerId> <x> <y>
    walk 5 100 300

and

    ['walk', '<PlayerId>', '<x>', '<y>']
    ['walk', 5, 100, 300]

in terms of bytes and parsing, this is trivial, but it is a standard JSON document and everyone knows JSON, which is a huge win on the developer side.

[dpeckett]

Amen to that.