Protobuf Roadmap

[Matthew White]

Hello;

Is there a published protobuf (and grpc as well) roadmap?  The releases on the github.com sites are regular which is brilliant.

For example, is there a protobuf v4 format? I get the impression, please correct me if I'm wrong, that the overall level of function is stable and mature.  

What's the future hold I guess is my question, and how is it possible to contribute to that?

Cheers, Matthew

[Adam Cozzette]

Hi Matthew,

We haven't published a formal roadmap for protobuf. The gRPC project has its own team maintaining it, so I am not sure of their roadmap. For protobuf we're working on a bunch of different things but I'd say probably the biggest theme is that we're trying to make it work better on client platforms (i.e. mobile and web), where code size is really important. On the server side we're still trying to optimize to save CPU cycles wherever we can. You're right that overall protobuf is pretty stable and mature, though the languages that we most recently added support for are still undergoing some bigger changes. We don't have any plans for a proto4, and we're maintaining both proto2 and proto3 indefinitely going forward.

That would be great if you want to contribute to protobuf. The one thing I should warn you about is that we're fairly conservative when it comes to accepting big API changes. Once we expand the API we have to maintain it forever, and that gets especially difficult if it's something that has to be multiplied across all languages we support. So before you spend too much time implementing something it would be a good idea to ask on the mailing list or GitHub and make sure the team is onboard with the idea. Bug fixes and cleanups are much simpler, though, so if you have any of those in mind then feel free to send us pull requests any time.

Adam

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