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Google Open-sources its Internal Data Exchange Language

Linked by David Adams on Wed 9th Jul 2008 17:24 UTC, submitted by stonyandcher

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases, according to official company blog posts and documents reported in this article. "Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

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Comment by Kroc

by Kroc on Wed 9th Jul 2008 17:49 UTC

Member since:
2005-11-10

This is good stuff. Proper beard-powered engineering.
I looked through the spec and this is built for speed, compactness, portability and compatibility.

I wonder if a compiler/interpreter can be ported to the web (PHP/JS/Ruby &c.), it would be very interesting to process back-end data-streams on the front-end this way.

I might try a PHP port myself, PHP does have the necessary binary operators.

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cool

by DirtyHarry on Wed 9th Jul 2008 17:57 in reply to "Comment by Kroc"

Member since:
2006-01-31

We're already downloaded it to have a look at it. Although it's basically 'nothing new', what I really like is the simplicity of the IDL language, the .proto files.

I wonder if there's a dissector for Wireshark already?

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RE: cool

by tomcat on Thu 10th Jul 2008 01:13 in reply to "cool"

Member since:
2006-01-06

We're already downloaded it to have a look at it. Although it's basically 'nothing new', what I really like is the simplicity of the IDL language, etc

You are aware that IDL is, like, 20 years old, right?

Edited 2008-07-10 01:31 UTC

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