alt Hacker NewsMandatory comment about ASN.1, a protocol from 1984, already did what Protobuf does, with more flexibility. Yes, it's a bit ugly but if you stick to the DER encoding it's really not worse than Protbuf at all. Check out the Wikipedia example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN.1#Example_encoded_in_DER
Protobuf is ok but if you actually look at how the serializers work, it's just too complex for what it achieves.
Replies
I also think ASN.1 DER is better (there are other formats, but in my opinion, DER is the only good one, because BER is too messy). I use it in some of my stuff, and when I can, my new designs also use ASN.1 DER rather than using JSON and Protobuf etc. (Some types are missing from standard ASN.1 but I made up a variant called "ASN.1X" which adds some additional types such as key/value list and some others. With the key/value list type added, it is now a superset of the data model of JSON, so you can convert JSON to ASN.1X DER.)
(I wrote a implementation of DER encoding/decoding in C, which is public domain and FOSS.)
ASN.1 is way overengineered to the point of making it hard to support. You don't need inheritance for example.
> Protobuf is ok but if you actually look at how the serializers work, it's just too complex for what it achieves.
Yeah. I do remember a lot of workloads at Google where most of the CPU time was spent serializing/deserializing protos.
What makes it too complex in your opinion?
I honestly looked up for a encoder/decoder for python/c++ application, and couldnt find anything usable; i guess i would need to contact the purchase department for a license (?), while with protobuf i can make the decision myself & all alone
> ASN.1, a protocol from 1984, already did what Protobuf does, with more flexibility.
After working heavily with SNMP across a wide variety of OEMs, this flexibility becomes a downside. Or SNMP/MIBs were specified at the wrong abstraction level, where the ASN.1 flexibility gives mfgs too much power to do insane and unconventional things.
ASN.1 has too much stuff. The moment you write "I made ASN.1 decoder/encoder", someone will throw TeletexString or BMPString at it. Or inheritance, as morshu9001 sad. So at this point:
- You can support all those features, and your ASM.1 library will be horribly bloated and over-engineered.
- You can support your favorite subset, but then you cannot say it's ASN.1 anymore. It will be "ASN.brabel", which only has one implementation (yours). And who wants that?
(unless you are Google and have immense developer influence... But in this case, why not design things from scratch, since we are making all-new protocol anyway?)