Buf blog

The first 15 field numbers are special: most runtimes will decode them much faster than the other field numbers. When designing a message type for decoding performance, it’s good to use these field numbers on fields that are almost always present.

Instead of using oneofs, you can now use the new (buf.validate.message).oneof Protovalidate annotation. As long as you're validating your messages with Protovalidate, (buf.validate.message).oneof does exactly what you'd expect, with none of the pain.

Don’t use 'required' to modify fields—you won’t be able to get rid of it later when you realize it was a bad idea.

buf convert and protoscope are powerful tools for examining and debugging wire format dumps.

Enum values are a poorly designed feature and shouldn’t be used.

Avoid import public and import weak.

Protobuf’s distributed nature introduces evolution risks that make it hard to fix some types of mistakes. Sometimes the best thing to do is to just let it be.

Enums inherit some unfortunate behaviors from C++. Avoid this problem by using the Buf lint rules ENUM_VALUE_PREFIX and ENUM_ZERO_VALUE_SUFFIX.

Compression is everywhere. This pervasiveness means that wire size tradeoffs matter less than they used to twenty years ago, when Protobuf was designed.

Don’t rename fields. Even though there are a slim number of cases you can get away with it, it’s rarely worth doing, and is a potential source of bugs.

Today we’re announcing the 2.0 release of the Protobuf-ES project, our fully compliant Protobuf implementation for JavaScript and TypeScript. This release introduces full support for Protobuf Editions, new APIs for field presence & default values, TypeScript typing for Protobuf’s JSON Format, a full reflection API, support for Protobuf custom options, and more convenient APIs for managing extension registries. The 2.0 release is a major version bump, and comes with breaking changes. Read on to learn what’s changed and how to migrate to the 2.0 release.

Today, we’re launching the 1.0 release of our new unified GitHub Action, powered by the Buf CLI. This integration streamlines the processes of building, formatting, linting, and checking for breaking changes in your Protobuf schemas. It seamlessly integrates with GitHub's pull request workflow and automatically publishes Protobuf schema changes to the Buf Schema Registry when pull requests are merged.

Most Protobuf users should ignore Editions and continue using proto3. If you become an early adopter, we’ve been working closely with Google to ensure that Buf will support editions as soon as they’re generally available.

Kong Insomnia’s 9.0 release includes integrated support for the Buf Schema Registry. Organizations adopting gRPC can now provide developers first-class GUI tools while keeping schema access simple and secure.

Fast serialization and small payloads are nice, but schema-driven development is why you’ll adopt Protobuf.

A look to the future of Protobuf validation