Library to read and write protocol buffers data

Version 3 is alpha

Currently developed branch of rust-protobuf is 3. It has the same spirit as version 2, but contains numerous improvements like:

• runtime reflection for mutability, not just for access
• protobuf text format and JSON parsing (which rely on reflection)
• dynamic message support: work with protobuf data without generating code from schema

Stable version of rust-protobuf will be supported until version 3 released.

Tracking issue for version 3.

Features

This crate has one feature, which is with-bytes.

with-bytes enables protobuf crate support for bytes crate: when parsing bytes or strings from bytes::Bytes, protobuf will be able to reference the input instead of allocating subarrays.

Note, codegen also need to be instructed to generate Bytes or Chars for bytes or string protobuf types instead of default Vec<u8> or String, just enabling option on this crate is not enough.

See Customize struct in protobuf-codegen crate.

Accompanying crates

• protobuf-codegen can be used to rust code from .proto crates.
• protoc crate can be used to invoke protoc programmatically.
• protoc-bin-vendored contains protoc command packed into the crate.
• protobuf-parse contains .proto file parser. Rarely need to be used directly, but can be used for mechanical processing of .proto files.