I've recently had to look for a C# porting of the Protocol Buffers library originally developped by Google. And guess what, I found two projects owned both by two very well known persons here: protobuf-csharp-port, written by Jon Skeet and protobuf-net, written by Marc Gravell. My question is simple: which one do I have to choose ?
I quite like Marc's solution as it seems to me closer to C# philisophy (for instance, you can just add attributes to the properties of existing class) and it looks like it can support .NET built-in types such as System.Guid.
I am sure both of them are really great projects but what's your oppinion?
Introduction. Protobuf-net is a faster . NET library for serialization and deserialization based on Google's Protocol Buffers. It is designed to be a language neutral, platform neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols and efficient data storage (far smaller than xml).
The required , optional , and repeated keywords in Protocol Buffers definitions are extremely powerful. They allow you to encode, at the schema level, the shape of your data structure, and the implementation details of how classes work in each language are handled for you.
I agree with Jon's points; if you are coding over multiple environments, then his version gives you a similar API to the other "core" implementations. protobuf-net is much more similar to how most of the .NET serializers are implemented, so is more familiar (IMO) to .NET devs. And as Jon notes - the raw binary output should be identical so you can re-implement with a different API if you need to later.
Some points re protobuf-net that are specific to this implementation:
ISerializable
for existing typesShouldSerialize[name]
XmlType
/XmlElement
or DataContract
/DataMember
) - meaning (for example) that LINQ-to-SQL models serialize out-of-the-box (as long as serialization is enabled in the DBML)(*=these features use 100% valid protobuf binary, but which might be hard to consume from other languages)
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With