Cap’n Proto - Hackdot

Re:Cap’n Proto by anongoogler2 on Sunday September 11, 2016 @04:37PM (#12475564)

I could imagine implementing something like this as an alternate wire format and client library for protocol buffers. Can you outline the main reason you chose not to go this route? In particular, what aspects of the proto descriptor language don't fit Cap'n Proto? Or what aspects did you feel needed to be changed for some other reason?

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Re:Cap’n Proto by kentonv on Sunday September 11, 2016 @07:09PM (#12476189)

To be clear, by "alternate wire format and client library for protobuf" you mean "reuse the protobuf IDL but change everything else", right?

There are a few major reasons I didn't go that route:

* The .proto language has a lot of weird quirks that I don't like. Some of the quirks are specific to the protobuf encoding (e.g. int32 vs. sint32 vs. fixed32 being different types), while other quirks have no particular rationale behind them. I didn't want that baggage.

* The .proto language does not treat interfaces (aka services) as a first-class type. That is, you cannot define a field whose type is an RPC interface type -- a reference to a remote object. The ability to do this is a critical part of Cap'n Proto's interface design.

* It's highly unlikely that the protobuf team would be interested in accepting changes to the language which were not actually supported by protobuf. This means that if I shared the language, I would have my hands tied when it comes to new features -- or I'd also have to implement Protobuf equivalents to make them happy.

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Re:Cap’n Proto by anongoogler2 on Sunday September 11, 2016 @09:41PM (#12476673)

Yeah that's what I meant. To me re-using the IDL would be a big plus because then all data can always be converted from one format to the other.

The reasons you gave make sense, although I'm not super familiar with the RPC aspect of protocol buffers so that's new to me.

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Re:Cap’n Proto by kentonv on Sunday September 11, 2016 @10:44PM (#12476864)

For cases that don't use features specific to one format or the other, it should be easy to write a tool that automatically converts between schema formats, FWIW.

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