"protocol buffers which have zero backwards compatibility"
Either I misunderstand you, or this is _remarkably_ wrong: Protocol buffers were designed to make it easy to define protocols which are both backward and forward compatible.
Either I misunderstand you, or this is _remarkably_ wrong: Protocol buffers were designed to make it easy to define protocols which are both backward and forward compatible.
This compatibility pattern also leads me to conclude that protocol buffers aren't a suitable model for generating a client-side type system. You'll just end up with structures where everything is a Maybe type, so you end up needing tons of bespoke client-side code to handle the possible permutations.
You need a layer on top of of them to express the true type system suitable for clients, and I believe GraphQL does a great job of this (but I hasten to add that even GraphQL's type system is relatively limited and isn't a magic bullet).
> You'll just end up with structures where everything is a Maybe type, so you end up needing tons of bespoke client-side code to handle the possible permutations.
Absent primitive values default to zero, while absent message fields are mapped to what makes most sense in the specific programming language (in most of them, "null" or "nil").