> Self-describing is point-less for serializations
you couldn't be more wrong. what happens when you lose the schema, or never had access to it in the first place? think from the point of view of reverse engineering
you couldn't be more wrong. what happens when you lose the schema, or never had access to it in the first place? think from the point of view of reverse engineering
And if you lose your own schema, then you probably have more serious underlying problems.
Do I want protobufs replacing JSON? No. I want flatbufs augmenting JSON (and XML, and ...).
I maintain an ASN.1 compiler and run-time that supports transliteration of DER to JSON. This is possible because the syntax/schema language/IDL and the encoding rules are separable. This is how you get the best of both worlds. You can use optimized binary encoding rules for interchange but convert to/from JSON/XML/whatever as needed for inspection.
Ideally it is capnproto instead of protobuf, but in general the same applies.
It is a _transport_ protocol. You can still write your config or data in any format you like.