alt Hacker NewsI'm in the same boat. I mostly write Rust and Python. Using serde_json and Pydantic, you get deserialization and validation at the same time. It allows you to de-serialize really "tight" types.
Most of my APIs are internal APIs that accept breaking changes easily. My experience with protobufs is that it was created to solve problems in large systems with many teams and APIs, where backwards compatibility is important. There are certainly systems where you can't "just" push through a breaking API change, and in those cases protobufs make sense.
> My experience with protobufs is that it was created to solve problems in large systems with many teams and APIs
Also significant distribution such that it’s impossible to ensure every system is updated in lockstep (at least not without significant downtime), and high tail latencies e.g. a message could be stashed into a queue or database and processed hours or days later.