Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Defining messages using protocol buffers

Protocol buffers are language- and platform-neutral mechanisms for serializing structured data in a very efficient manner. To achieve language neutrality, protocol buffers describe both messages and RPC services in a high-level interface definition language (IDL).

To start working with protocol buffers, we need to install the protoc compiler for our development environment. You can do this by compiling from source or by installing a pre-built binary release for your platform from https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases.

In addition, you will also need to install the Go output generator for the protoc compiler and the Go packages that are required for working with protocol buffers and the ...