Re:Ask HN: When does it make sense to roll your own X?
by Matthias247 on Sunday July 14, 2019 @11:43AM
(#20434007)
Indeed. Using plain structs one can't just add a single field with a reasonable default and still be backward compatible - which is a very very common case in API design.
You could add completely new revision of the API. But having to maintain it - typically additionally to the old revision since both sides might not updateable in atomic fashion - is a lot of extra work.
Serialization which allows to add and remove fields in a backward compatible fashion is a mandatory requirement for any bigger sized project for me. If you need super high performance maybe use Flatbuffers or Cap'N'Proto instead of Protobuf/JSON/CBOR - but I really wouldn't recommend to go for plain structs.
You could add completely new revision of the API. But having to maintain it - typically additionally to the old revision since both sides might not updateable in atomic fashion - is a lot of extra work.
Serialization which allows to add and remove fields in a backward compatible fashion is a mandatory requirement for any bigger sized project for me. If you need super high performance maybe use Flatbuffers or Cap'N'Proto instead of Protobuf/JSON/CBOR - but I really wouldn't recommend to go for plain structs.