Protocol Buffers
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Search complete. 18 mentions across 9 episodes found for "Protocol Buffers".
Oct 28, 2026
ScottHOST
Especially on this show.
ScottHOST
And anytime I open my mouth, it's usually about Protobuf or something else like that as well.
ScottHOST
But fixing event loops and making it so that all calls are asynchronous, including to the database itself, so that no one call is blocking is an important thing.
ScottHOST
So that fix went in as well.
Frank DelporteHOST
Mm-hmm.
Frank DelporteHOST
Uh, is it comparable to, like, Protobuf? That's something I know.
Dmitry MoskalyukGUEST
Yeah, yeah.
Dmitry MoskalyukGUEST
It's, uh, a layer upon that.
Rain PahariaGUEST
And so you end up having this system, and- Uh, and so all of those systems also use the same OpenAPI tooling.
Rain PahariaGUEST
And you might be like, "Okay, well, why not use Protobuf or whatever?" Uh, well, certainly it's more efficient to use Protobuf, I guess, than JSON, but also, like, this is control level data, so it's, like, very small.
Rain PahariaGUEST
Um, and doing... building this tooling, we have to do for our customer systems anyway, right? So we might as well also do it internally so we don't have to maintain two separate systems.
Rain PahariaGUEST
The same system can be used for both of those things, and so that's really cool.
Rain PahariaGUEST
And if you have those properties, then you... and then you can use what we call server side versioning, which is where a single server can understand multiple versions of clients at the same time.
Rain PahariaGUEST
Now, um, this is, as far as I understand, relatively uncommon in the industry.
Rain PahariaGUEST
And so, for example, Google and so on, like ev- they use Protobuf, and so they use Protobuf, uh, like, field numbers and, and, uh, Meta uses Thrift, which is kind of like Protobuf, uh, and, and same, has the same field number property.
Rain PahariaGUEST
Now, the thing about Protobuf fields is that certainly they are one way to do versioning, but, uh, it isn't really documented anywhere which versions a particular server or client produces or which fields a particular server or client produces.
speaker_1HOST
Because JSON is too bloated for this level of high-speed transit.
speaker_1HOST
The VED string is almost certainly utilizing protocol buffers or Protobufs.
speaker_0HOST
Protobufs.
speaker_1HOST
Right.
speaker_0HOST
Okay.
Tom HacohenGUEST
It's like worse is better, and you get to use...
Tom HacohenGUEST
And you get to add value by using JSON that you wouldn't by using, I don't know, um, Protobuf or whatever, you know, other thing that it may be better, may be worse.
Tom HacohenGUEST
Or even MessagePack, right, which never caught on.
Tom HacohenGUEST
Um, so I think webhooks are like that.
LisaHOST
Um, and it's funny 'cause when we dug into it too, at least, uh, for me, like OCaml doesn't really have any sort of like native Arrow libraries.
LisaHOST
It doesn't have any way to write Protobuf.
LisaHOST
Like, it, it [laughs] it's just not a language built for this.
LisaHOST
Um, and so while we were-
ScottHOST
You know, why not, right? It's like you now have this...
ScottHOST
It's...
ScottHOST
You know, 'cause before it was like, well, you know, what does the, what does Protobuf, uh, what does the compiler support? Uh, what does the ecosystem support? But nowadays it's like, well, if it doesn't support any of that, just build, build from that foundation all the way up.
ScottHOST
Uh, if you don't have the compiler, make it.
FabioHOST
So that they can just, uh, beam All the LTE goodness straight, uh, into your brain.
FabioHOST
Anyway, so they, they saw my badge and they were like, "Oh, we, we're using Protobuf for this stuff.
FabioHOST
It's so cool." I was like, "Oh yeah, that's fine.
FabioHOST
Yeah, actually, I work on Zephyr." And they went like, "Oh, by the way, one of the things in this thing uses Zephyr."
ScottHOST
Like, for me, I know I've talked a lot about streaming.
ScottHOST
I've talked about Protobuf.
ScottHOST
I had to bring it up again because it's every episode I have to bring it up.
ScottHOST
But, like, with a lot of the streaming, like, uh, streaming data nowadays, I feel like with, like, our, uh, you know, our agentic ecosystem, like, it has to be streaming for a lot of these use cases.
ScottHOST
Um, and that was kind of going back to last week when we talked about, like, you know, XML support to variant, like why would people want that, and, like, the use cases for that.
ScottHOST
Um, and so we had covered that in a webinar, um, this week that's, um, on, like, the Apache Spark, uh, open source, uh, channel on YouTube, uh, which we can put into, like, the show note as well, um, for that this week.
ScottHOST
But one of the really interesting things, I think, with, like, uh, like, variant shredding is that you kind of go from, like, this, like, loosely typed, like, JSON-like structure that behaves a lot more like, you know, a standard kind of, like, Parquet row and/or, like, a Protobuf-type row where, you know...
ScottHOST
I, and I shouldn't say Protobuf.
Arlen NipperGUEST
Let's, let's go through the top 10, if you will, of, you know, what we're looking at, and we'll go through there now.
Arlen NipperGUEST
The top two, the top one is, is been around forever, is that provide an option to use either Google Protobuf or JSON encoding.
Arlen NipperGUEST
So you can have a flag and you can publish in binary Google Protobuf or you can publish in JSON.
Arlen NipperGUEST
The second thing that everybody, of course, has asked for is to be able to extend the topic namespace.
Arlen NipperGUEST
So right now we have a group ID, device ID, node ID, and that followed...
Arlen NipperGUEST
So if you, if you had a group...
Arlen NipperGUEST
So if you wanna take your topic namespaces and say all the way down to a measurement, you could do that now coming with V4, but the amount of data that you'll be putting on the MQTT network and on the brokers and everything will go up by order of magnitude.
Arlen NipperGUEST
With JSON versus Google Protobuf, you're also looking at an order of magnitude there.