Protocol Buffers
Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanism for serializing structured data, developed by Google. It uses a schema definition language to define data structures, which are then compiled into code for various programming languages to efficiently serialize and deserialize data. Protobuf is designed to be smaller, faster, and simpler than alternatives like XML or JSON for data interchange in distributed systems.
Developers should learn and use Protobuf when building high-performance, cross-platform applications that require efficient data serialization, such as microservices, gRPC APIs, or distributed systems where bandwidth and speed are critical. It is particularly useful in scenarios like real-time communication, data storage, or configuration files where structured data needs to be transmitted or persisted with minimal overhead and strong backward/forward compatibility.