[cryptonector]

This. Plus ASN.1 is pluggable as to encoding rules and has a large family of them:

  - BER/DER/CER (TLV)
  - OER and PER ("packed" -- no tags and
                 no lengths wherever
                 possible)
  - XER (XML!)
  - JER (JSON!)
  - GSER (textual representation)
  - you can add your own!
    (One could add one based on XDR,
     which would look a lot like OER/PER
     in a way.)

ASN.1 also gives you a way to do things like formalize typed holes.

Not looking at ASN.1, not even its history and evolution, when creating PB was a crime.

[StopDisinfo910]

The people who wrote PB clearly knew ASN.1. It was the most famous IDL at the time. Do you assume they just came one morning and decided to write PB without taking a look at what existed?

Anyway, as stated PB does more than ASN.1. It specifies both the description format and the encoding. PB is ready to be used out of the box. You have a compact IDL and a performant encoding format without having to think about anything. You have to remember that PB was designed for internal Google use as a tool to solve their problems, not as a generic solution.

ASN.1 is extremely unwieldy in comparaison. It has accumulated a lot of cruft through the year. Plus they don’t provide a default implementation.

[troupo]

> The people who wrote PB clearly knew ASN.1.

And your assumption is based on what exactly?

> It was the most famous IDL at the time.

Strange that at the same time (2001) people were busy implementing everyting in Java and XML, not ASN.1

> Do you assume they just came one morning and decided to write PB without taking a look at what existed?

Yes, that is a great assumption. Looking at what most companies do, this is an assumption bordering on prescience.

[StopDisinfo910]

> Strange that at the same time (2001) people were busy implementing everyting in Java and XML, not ASN.1

Yes. Meanwhile Google was designing an IDL with a default binary serialisation format. And this is not 2025 typical big corp, over staffed, fake HR levels heavy Google we are talking about. That’s Google in its heyday. I think you have answered your own comment.

[cryptonector]

> Do you assume they just came one morning and decided to write PB without taking a look at what existed?

Considering how bad an imitation of 1984 ASN.1 PB's IDL is, and how bad an imitation of 1984 DER PB is, yes I assume that PB's creators did not in fact know ASN.1 well. They almost certainly knew of ASN.1, and they almost certainly did not know enough about it because all the worst mistakes in ASN.1 PB re-created while adding zero new ideas or functionality. It's a terrible shame.

[StopDisinfo910]

PB is not a bad imitation of 1984 ASN.1. ASN.1 is choke full of useless representations clearly there to serve what a committee thought the need of the telco industry should be.

I find it funny you are making it looks like a good and pleasant to use IDL. It’s a perfect example of design by committee at its worst.

PB is significantly more space efficient than DER by the way.