> It's interesting, to everyone but but the mega shops like Google, protobuf is a schema declaration tool
There are lots of other benefits for non performance-oriented teams and projects: the codegen makes it language independent and it's pretty handy that you can share a single data model across all layers of your system.
If you don't care about the wire format, the standard JSON representation makes it pair well with JSON native databases, so you can get strict schema management without the need need for any clunky ORM.
That's assuming JSON native databases are fine for your use case though, but in practice it's only good for storing documents that don't need to be edited/queried much by the backend storing them.
> in practice it's only good for storing documents that don't need to be edited/queried much by the backend storing them
Why aren't they good for that? They can have very high write throughput, they don't require ORMs, and they can be indexed and queried using standard database methods like the SQL language.
You can even enforce strict schemas on them if you want to, just as you would with an RDBMS.
There are lots of other benefits for non performance-oriented teams and projects: the codegen makes it language independent and it's pretty handy that you can share a single data model across all layers of your system.
If you don't care about the wire format, the standard JSON representation makes it pair well with JSON native databases, so you can get strict schema management without the need need for any clunky ORM.