[jeroenhd]

Protobuf is pretty much ASN.1 with better tooling, optimized for message exchange protocol rather than files, when it comes down to the details. Withouth ASN.1 and the lessons learned from it, another binary serialization protocol would've probably taken its place, and I bet Protobuf and similar tools would look and perhaps work quite differently. The same way JSON would look and act quite differently if XML had never been invented.

[dathinab]

> Protobuf is pretty much ASN.1

no, not at all

they share some ideas, that doesn't make it "pretty much ASN.1". Its only "pretty much the same" if you argue all schema based general purpose binary encoding formats are "pretty much the same".

ASN.1 also isn't "file" specific at all it's main use case is and always has been being used as message exchange protocols.

(Strictly speaking ASN.1 is also not a single binary serialization format but 1. one schema language, 2. some rules for mapping things to some intermediate concepts, 3. a _docent_ different ways how to "exactly" serialize things. And in the 3rd point the difference can be pretty huge, from having something you can partially read even without schema (like protobuff) to more compact representations you can't read without a schema at all.)

[jeroenhd]

> if you argue all schema based general purpose binary encoding formats are "pretty much the same"

At the implementation level they are different, but when integrating these protocols into applications, yeah, pretty much. Schema + data goes in, encoded data comes out, or the other way around. In the same way YAML and XML are pretty much the same, just different expressions of the same concepts. ASN.1 even comes with multiple expressions of exactly the same grammar, both in text form and binary form.

ASN.1 was one of the early standardised protocols in this space, though, and suffers from being used mostlyin obscure or legacy protocols, often with proprietary libraries if you go beyond the PKI side of things.

ASN.1 isn't file specific, it was designed for use in telecoms after all, but encodings like DER work better inside of file formats than Protobuf and many protocols like it. Actually having a formal standard makes including it in file types a lot easier.

[cryptonector]

PB is a lot more invasive at the build system layer, and in the libraries you have to link with. But that's not an essential aspect of PB, more like accidental, thus you're quite right :)