Consider migration from gogo to vtprotobuf

[alexshtin]

Currently we use https://github.com/golang/protobuf which is stable release. There is another repo under active development https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf-go which is considered to be "Next Generation Go Protocol Buffers". I found number of improvements there but don't want to use it right away because it states:

WARNING: This repository is in active development. There are no guarantees about API stability. Breaking changes will occur until a stable release is made and announced.

[alexshtin]

It is released: https://blog.golang.org/a-new-go-api-for-protocol-buffers but gRPC support is not there.

[alexshtin]

Consider switching to https://github.com/golang/protobuf/releases/tag/v1.4.0-rc.4 at least.

[alexshtin]

Discussion about future gRPC support in v2: golang/protobuf#1070.

[samarabbas]

@alexshtin is this still relevant?

[alexshtin]

It might be relevant one day. We are not using Google protobuf/gRPC plugin but using gogo. When v2 was finally released I made some tests and found out that gogo implementation still outperform it significantly. In a meantime gogo team said that adoption of v2 would require a lot of work and abandoned the project.

Recently vitess team created their own compiler which has some limitations but looks very promising. I would give it some time to mature and then investigate how hard it would be for us to migrate to it.

[alexshtin]

Other options to consider:

We have implemented fast marshaling and fast proto reflection for the golang proto v2 API. There are a few additional features in the works for our use case similar to customtype that may or may not be desirable for other protobuf users: https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-proto

We’ve added a few more features to protopatch in the last few weeks, like support for embedded structs and optional: https://github.com/alta/protopatch

[alexshtin]

One more option: https://github.com/CrowdStrike/csproto

[alexshtin]

Vitess Protocol Buffers compiler: https://github.com/planetscale/vtprotobuf.