Mojo - Comparison with Protocol Buffers

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Michael Francis

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Jun 21, 2016, 3:58:40 PM6/21/16

to mojo-dev

As a non Googler looking at Mojo I'm trying to understand the differences between it and Protocol Buffers.

Would some be interested in write a short comparison of the two?

Adam Barth

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Jun 21, 2016, 4:10:52 PM6/21/16

to Michael Francis, mojo-dev

On Tue, Jun 21, 2016 at 12:58 PM Michael Francis <mfran...@gmail.com> wrote:

As a non Googler looking at Mojo I'm trying to understand the differences between it and Protocol Buffers.
Would some be interested in write a short comparison of the two?

The short answer is that protobuffers are designed to transport data between machines whereas Mojo is designed to transport data within one machine. For example, that's why Mojo messages can contain handles as well as data. These handles can represent additional message pipes or other objects, such as shared memory. These objects can't be serialized to a sequence of bytes (otherwise they'd be part of the data rather than handles) and cannot be transported between machines (typically because they reference some underlying resource in the kernel).