Re:Pb-jelly – A Protobuf code generation framework for Rust,...
by rbtying on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @03:36PM
(#24496650)
another former contributor to pb-jelly, though no longer at Dropbox.
protoc plugins have an interesting bootstrapping problem as well: the protoc-gen-$LANG interface requires the ability to ser/de protobuf messages that describe the proto file's AST. If your build system builds almost everything from scratch, including the protoc plugin, this means that you need to have a variant of your protoc plugin linked to a working proto implementation...
That's not to say this is impossible or even difficult, but at the time that I last looked at it (more than a year ago at this point), it made it fairly unpalatable to move the codegen from Python to Rust.
protoc plugins have an interesting bootstrapping problem as well: the protoc-gen-$LANG interface requires the ability to ser/de protobuf messages that describe the proto file's AST. If your build system builds almost everything from scratch, including the protoc plugin, this means that you need to have a variant of your protoc plugin linked to a working proto implementation...
That's not to say this is impossible or even difficult, but at the time that I last looked at it (more than a year ago at this point), it made it fairly unpalatable to move the codegen from Python to Rust.