protoc-gen-go-binary

This is a plugin for the Google Protocol Buffers compiler protoc that generates code to implement encoding.BinaryMarshaler and encoding.BinaryUnmarshaler by just calling the Marshal and Unmarshal functions already generated for the types.

This enables Go-generated protobuf messages to be used in situations where the code already supports using the binary marshaling interfaces.

Most of the code herein was copied from github.com/mitchellh/protoc-gen-go-json with enough modifications to implement the binary marshaling interfaces instead of the JSON ones.

Install

go get github.com/mkeeler/protoc-gen-go-binary

Also required:

• protoc
• protoc-gen-gofast

Usage

Define your messages like normal:

syntax = "proto3";

message Request {
  oneof kind {
    string name = 1;
    int32  code = 2;
  }
}

The example message purposely uses a oneof since this won't work by default with encoding/json. Next, generate the code:

protoc --gofast_out=. --go-binary_out=. request.proto

Your output should contain a file request.pb.binary.go which contains the implementation of encoding.BinaryMarshal/BinaryUnmarshal for all your message types. You can then encode binary encode your message as protobufs.

import (
  "bytes"
  "encoding/gob"
)

var buf bytes.Buffer
encoder := gob.NewEncoder(&buf)

// Marshal
err := encoder.Encode(&Request{
  Kind: &Kind_Name{
    Name: "alice",
  },
}

// Unmarshal
var result Request
decoder := gob.NewDecoder(&buf)
err := decoder.Decode(&result)