what is the purpose of "rawproto" files?

Question

In Android Studio, in

~/StudioProjects/$APPLICATION/build/android-profile/,

there are many files profile-*.rawproto, e.g., profile-2017-04-25-18-19-51-815.rawproto.

I have never seen the file suffix .rawproto, does this suggest a certain kind of file, and if so, what is this file generally used for?

With some digging online, it seems to be related to Gradle in IntelliJ/Studio, which is a sensible conclusion since it is in the build directory. But this is all the information I am able to find on what this is or what it should do.

Answer 1

That filename pattern is mentioned in ProcessProfileWriterFactory.java, part of the Android Gradle plugin. Once a real filename is created, it is passed to ProcessProfileWriter.java which seems to write some analytics data about the build process to a file. The rawproto file format is probably Google's Protocol Buffers.