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Comment by bruth | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the response! These are very good references. I like the breakdown of message and/or service definitions into separate files so it is easy to browse through the repository. I am assuming the version bump (v1 vs. v2) occurs when you introducing breaking changes to the API? I am aware that protobuf does a good job at allowing forwards and backwards compatibility at the message level..

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Correct on the versioning. We internally treat protos as an immutable descriptions of our API interfaces. That means whenever we need to change anything (outside of bugs), be it adding a new field, or changing the order, renaming fields, changing types, ... we start a new version.

We also use a lot of inheritance of non-default types (timestamps, errors, ...) so it's important to make sure that we don't break anything for others.

Interesting so adding new fields even.. I suppose there is quite a bit of planning and iterating on the interface before making it public to reduce churn? I understand doing that for backwards incompatible changes.

We add new fields (or redesign existing protos) very sporadically. We also don't have fully automated process to deal with a change in a proto within all projects so by using new versions we can signal to the developers that they should eventually adopt it. We are actively using 5 languages that have to deal with the changes, so we found it easier overall to do it this way.

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