create haskell data from .proto message files (and vice versa)

[ghorn]

The documentation mentions this is in the works already. It would be nice to have this, especially since the hprotoc project seems to be broken on ghc 7.8

[NathanHowell]

I disabled protoc-gen-hs in recent builds because it doesn't produce working output and it has a dependency on a pretty heavyweight library: haskell-src-exts. It would be great to get something that does work and uses explicit layout or a light weight pretty printer.

There is also a stub of a .proto generator that needs some love:
src/Data/ProtocolBuffers/Ppr.hs. It was built against type-level and has experienced some bitrot since the 7.8 conversion. This should be significantly easier to get working than the Haskell codgen.

If you want to take a stab at either one I'm more than happy to accept pull requests.

[YellowOnion]

In the meantime, is there anyway to manually convert .proto to work with this library.

[NathanHowell]

@YellowOnion yes, you can manually translate messages in a .proto file into their protobuf equivalent records in Haskell... for example most of the records in https://github.com/alphaHeavy/protobuf/blob/master/plugin/Main.hs were translated from https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/src/google/protobuf/descriptor.proto