Protobuf is decent enough, I've used Avro and Thrift before (way way before protobuf came to be), and the dev experience of protobuf has been the best so far.
It's definitely not amazing, code generation in general will always have its quirks, but protobuf has some decent guardrails to keep the protocol backwards-forwards compatible (which was painful with Avro without tooling for enforcement), it can be used with JSON as a transport for marshaling if needed/wanted, and is mature enough to have a decent ecosystem of libraries around.
Not that I absolutely love it but it gets the job done.
alt Hacker News
Protobuf is decent enough, I've used Avro and Thrift before (way way before protobuf came to be), and the dev experience of protobuf has been the best so far.
It's definitely not amazing, code generation in general will always have its quirks, but protobuf has some decent guardrails to keep the protocol backwards-forwards compatible (which was painful with Avro without tooling for enforcement), it can be used with JSON as a transport for marshaling if needed/wanted, and is mature enough to have a decent ecosystem of libraries around.
Not that I absolutely love it but it gets the job done.