

That’s exactly where Protobuf appears in the picture. You need specified protocols to handle huge traffic. This will give you flexibility but not a good idea when you have a tremendous amount of data. So what now? Yeah, you can sure go ahead and invent your own serialization technique. Also encoding and decoding can impose a great performance penalty on the application.

This approach is great for the front-end since it is human readable but what about backend server to server communication? These formats are notorious for being space intensive.
#Protobuff windows cmake code
The code must be compiled with the same memory layout and endianness, etc. But what If I want to retrieve that data over some other memory layout? A straightforward No! That’s not how we play. The raw in-memory data structures can be sent or saved in binary form.But what should be the format for data serialization? Here are a few fixes for this. Which in simple words mean that we need to serialize data if we are to store it or transfer. “Serialization is the process of translating data structures or object state into a format that can be stored (for example, in a file or memory buffer) or transmitted (for example, across a network connection link) and reconstructed later (possibly in a different computer environment)”.

To fully get the concept of Protobuf, we first need to understand what is serialization and what are the problems we had that needed to be solved. So, for this article, we’ll be talking about. Allow me to walk you through it till you’re able to digest it. Now, if you didn’t get all those heavy terms at first it’s fine. Protocol Buffer is a language-agnostic binary data format developed by Google to serialize the structured data between different services. Spreading the light, let me share what did I learn about Protocol Buffer. Even I hadn’t heard about Protobuf up until a friend made me realize what I was missing onto. But trust me, you are not the only one to think like that. Well, you might haven’t heard of the term Google Protobuf or more commonly known as Protocol Buffer and wondering if it’s a buzzword or something.
