CODEWITHSUNDEEP
parsingserializationprotocol-bufferslanguage-interoperability
Vee
Vee

Reputation: 776

Can Google Protocol Buffers be serialized/parsed between different languages?

The official site as well as some other sources describe one of the benefits of Google Protocol Buffers as being highly inter-operable. I know the technology supports different language bindings out of the box, and many more as third party implementations, but what does that mean exactly?

Is my understanding correct in thinking that as long as I have a common schema file, I can run the protoc compiler and generate code for multiple languages, and then write a program in one language using the generated code, serialize some data to a file, and then parse it in another language in another program?

For example, could my client-side application running in Java serialize a Google Protocol Buffer and send it over the wire to a server implemented in C++ which can then parse it and use it readily as long as both sides were generated from the same schema file?

If that is correct, what allows that to happen - is it that their serialization/parsing logic adhere to a common/consistent wire format detailed here?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1622

Answers (1)

rici
rici

Reputation: 241681

Yes, you can, and yes, it is because the wire format is fixed (i.e. the same for any language binding).

Upvotes: 5

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