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by codewritero 197 days ago
I love to see people advocating for better protocols and standards but seeing the title I expected the author to present something which would be better in the sense of supporting the same or more use cases with better efficiency and/or ergonomics and I don't think that protobuf does that.

Protobuf has advantages, but is missing support for a tons of use cases where JSON thrives due to the strict schema requirement.

A much stronger argument could be made for CBOR as a replacement for JSON for most use cases. CBOR has the same schema flexibility as JSON but has a more concise encoding.
2 comments
port11 197 days ago
I think the strict schema of Protobuf might be one of the major improvements, as most APIs don't publish a JSON schema? I've always had to use ajv or superstruct to make sure payloads match a schema, Protobuf doesn't need that (supposedly).
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thayne 196 days ago
One limitation of protobuf 3 schemas, is they doen't allow required fields. That makes it easier to remove the field in a later version in a backwards compatible way, but sometimes fields really are required, and the message doesn't make any sense without them. Ideally, IMO, if the message is missing those fields, it would fail to parse successfully. But with protobuf, you instead get a default value, which could potentially cause subtle bugs.
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port11 195 days ago
Okay, this is a definite issue, you're still stuck validating inputs/outputs.
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youngtaff 197 days ago
We need browsers to support CBOR APIs… and it shouldn’t be that hard as they all have internal implementations now
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deathanatos 197 days ago
I suppose I should publish this, but a WASM module, in Rust, which just binds [ciborium] into JS only took me ~100 LoC. (And by this I mean that it effectively provides a "cbor_load" function to JS, which returns JS objects; I mention this just b/c I think some people have the impression that WASM can't interact with JS except by serializing stuff to/from bytestrings and/or JSON, which isn't really the whole story now with refs.)

But yes, a native implementation would save me the trouble!

[ciborium]: a Rust CBOR library; https://docs.rs/ciborium/latest/ciborium/

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