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Comment by vii | Hacker News Reader

Protobuf actually has a canonical text format. It's easy to produce in C++ or Java https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/referenc...

The format has much less extra syntactical noise than JSON.

For example,

    name: "vii"  # comments allowed!
    id: 23923373

Pretty nifty as it allows readable configuration files with structured data.

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if it is an "easy to produce or consume in language X" it does not mean it is canonical - it means that language X has an extension that allows to do so. Is there a place in protobuf spec or documentation mentioning this to be a part of the protocol?

Language X is at least C++ (as linked), Java https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/referenc... , and Python https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/master/pyth...

I think the Protobuf spec focuses on the binary serialization - the text format and JSON representations are not related to that at all, of course.

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