[jonathrg]

The generated types in go are horrible to work with. You can't store instances of them anywhere, or pass them by value, because they contain a bunch of state and pointers (including a [0]sync.Mutex just to explicitly prohibit copying). So you have to pass around pointers at all times, making ownership and lifetime much more complicated than it needs to be. A message definition like this

    message AppLogMessage {
        sint32 Value1 = 1;
        double Value2 = 2;
    }

becomes

    type Example struct {
        state                    protoimpl.MessageState 
        xxx_hidden_Value1        int32                  
        xxx_hidden_Value2        float64                  
        xxx_hidden_unknownFields protoimpl.UnknownFields
        sizeCache                protoimpl.SizeCache
    }

For [place of work] where we use protobuf I ended up making a plugin to generate structs that don't do any of the nonsense (essentially automating Option 1 in the article):

    type ExamplePOD struct {
        Value1 int32
        Value2 float64
    }

with converters between the two versions.