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Concept
Protocol Buffers
Summary
Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs that communicate with each other over a network or for storing data. The method involves an interface description language that describes the structure of some data and a program that generates source code from that description for generating or parsing a stream of bytes that represents the structured data.
Google developed Protocol Buffers for internal use and provided a code generator for multiple languages under an open-source license (see below).
The design goals for Protocol Buffers emphasized simplicity and performance. In particular, it was designed to be smaller and faster than XML.
Protocol Buffers are widely used at Google for storing and interchanging all kinds of structured information. The method serves as a basis for a custom remote procedure call (RPC) system that is used for nearly all inter-machine communication at Google.
Protocol Buffers are similar to the Apache Thrift (used by Facebook, Evernote), Ion (created by Amazon), or Microsoft Bond protocols, offering as well a concrete RPC protocol stack to use for defined services called gRPC.
Data structure schemas (called messages) and services are described in a proto definition file (.proto) and compiled with protoc. This compilation generates code that can be invoked by a sender or recipient of these data structures. For example, example.pb.cc and example.pb.h are generated from example.proto. They define C++ classes for each message and service in example.proto.
Canonically, messages are serialized into a binary wire format which is compact, forward- and backward-compatible, but not self-describing (that is, there is no way to tell the names, meaning, or full datatypes of fields without an external specification). There is no defined way to include or refer to such an external specification (schema) within a Protocol Buffers file.
Official source
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