v2.0.0-alpha.1

What's new in version 2

To support Protobuf editions, we have to make breaking changes that also affect users of proto2 and proto3. This prompted us to make more extensive changes that take feedback from version 1 into account:

We no longer uses classes. Instead, we generate a type and a descriptor for every message, and provide functions to create a new instance, for serialization, and other concerns. Here is a simple example:

import { create, toBinary, fromBinary, fromJsonString } from "@bufbuild/protobuf";
import { UserDesc } from "./gen/user_pb.js";

let user = create(UserDesc, {
  firstName: "Homer",
  lastName: "Simpson",
  active: true,
  locations: ["Springfield"],
  projects: { SPP: "Springfield Power Plant" },
  manager: {
    firstName: "Montgomery",
    lastName: "Burns",
  },
});

const bytes = toBinary(UserDesc, user);
user = fromBinary(UserDesc, bytes);
user = fromJsonString(UserDesc, '{"firstName": "Homer", "lastName": "Simpson"}');

This approach solves several outstanding issues, such as:

• #397 Provide custom options at runtime
• #551 Generated types allow assigning wrong message type if it is a superset of the target type
• #414 Improvements for proto2 required
• #738 type-save full enum value names
• #928 Better interop with 3rd party frameworks requiring plain objects
• #508 JSON types

If you use proto3, messages are now plain objects. Files with proto2 and editions use the prototype chain to track field presence.

Please note that this is an alpha release, and APIs might still change. We're also missing documentation yet. But if you want to try it out, we welcome your feedback!

This release is published with the alpha tag. To install the alpha packages, you can run:

npm install @bufbuild/protobuf@alpha @bufbuild/protoc-gen-es@alpha

Contributors

Thanks to @srikrsna-buf for his contributions to v2!