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Google's Protocol Buffers

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once. This takes the form of a template that describes the data structure. You use this template to encode and decode your data structure into wire-streams that may be sent-to or read-from your peers. The underlying wire stream is platform independent, lossless, and may be used to interwork with a variety of languages and systems regardless of word size or endianness.

This document was produced using PlDoc, with sources found in protobufs.pl and protobufs_overview.md. There is a simple example (assuming you've installed swi-prolog-doc) in /usr/share/swi-prolog/doc/packages/examples/protobufs/interop/addressbook.pl:

protoc -I/usr/share/doc/protobuf-compiler/examples -I/usr/include --swipl_out=/tmp/ \
    --plugin=protoc-gen-swipl=/usr/lib/swi-prolog/library/protobufs/protoc-gen-swipl \
    /usr/share/swi-prolog/doc/packages/examples/protobufs/interop/addressbook.pl

This generates /tmp/addressbook_pb.pl … you should change the --swipl-out= specification to be the directory you want (e.g., interop).

Note that protoc requires an -I item that encompasses the .proto file, so this also works:

protoc -I -I/usr/include --swipl_out=/tmp/ \
    -I/usr/share/swi-prolog/doc/packages/examples/protobufs/interop \
    --plugin=protoc-gen-swipl=/usr/lib/swi-prolog/library/protobufs/protoc-gen-swipl \
    addressbook.proto

and, if /usr/lib/swi-prolog/library/protobufs is in your PATH, you can leave out the --plugin option:

EXPORT PATH=/usr/lib/swi-prolog/library/protobufs:$PATH
protoc -I/usr/share/swi-prolog/doc/packages/examples/protobufs/interop -I/usr/include --swipl_out=/tmp/ addressbook.proto

It’s possible that your installation puts files in a different place; you can find the addressbook example with:

dpkg -L protobuf-compiler | grep addressbook

To test this, run the following:

swipl -g test_write -g test_write -g test_read -t halt addressbook.pl  # outputs to addressbook.wire
protoc --decode=tutorial.AddressBook addressbook.proto <addressbook.wire

@see https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers @author Jeffrey Rosenwald (JeffRose@acm.org), Peter Ludemann (peter.ludemann@gmail.com) @license BSD-2