Protocol Buffers

In this guide, we introduce some knowledge about Protocol Buffers (Protobuf).

What are the main advantages of Protobuf?

• The encoded message in binary format is smaller.
• The encoding & decoding process is faster.
• Language-neutral and can automatically generate serialization & deserialization code in different languages.

Why is the encoding used by Protobuf efficient?

• Base 128 varints: each byte has two parts: MSB (most significant bit, used to indicate whether this is the last byte) + rest 7 bits to represent real data (put the binary representation of each value into groups of 7 bits).
• Message structure: represent a message as key-value pairs, but use the field number rather than the field name as key. To store the size of the corresponding value, each field number is suffixed with 3 bits to represent its wire type. And again, the key is encoded as a varint as well.