DeWitt Clinton

"Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages – Java, C++, or Python." - DeWitt Clinton via Bookmarklet

And for ex-Googlers, come check out the version that we open sourced. All the awesome from before, but cleaned up and even tighter (see the Java apis now). - DeWitt Clinton

Very happy this finally happened. - Bret Taylor

Any chance of a high level comparison with Facebook Thrift? - Nick Lothian

support Java, C++, or Python. cool - accesine

interesting, I'm glad they supported python, looks a little like JSON - Bjorn Tipling

or like a struct - Bjorn Tipling

Of all the things to go open source since I've been at Google, this ranks near or at the very top of my list of favorites. A huge congrats to Kenton and everybody involved for pulling it off. May your data serialize efficiently and extensibly forevermore! - DeWitt Clinton

Thrift includes a whole RPC framework (including thread managers and so on). Protocol buffers are just a serialization mechanism. Otherwise, the differences are mostly in the details of the way things like versioning are handled. - ⓞnor