Goprotoc is a new experimental go protobuf compiler. It is a fork of GoGoProtobuf http://code.google.com/p/gogoprotobuf, which extends GoProtobuf http://code.google.com/p/goprotobuf

The main goal of this project is to reduce memory pressure/gc pauses and to provide useful API for accessing/mutating message fields.

Goprotoc should be considered in early alpha; it "works" that in can successfully compile proto files on a few number of testcases but is not used in any production environment.

Goprotoc welcomes any kind of contribution; please send any pull request for feature, tests or fixes.

tl;dr: You will need to sign the Dropbox CLA and run the tests.

• Remove pointers from messages, add special fields to check is set
• Generate full API functions to set/get/clear fields
• Make all fields private
• Optimize dynamic array growing
• Support custom fields

# Grab the code from this repository and install the proto package.
go get -u github.com/dropbox/goprotoc
run "make install" from goprotoc directory

The compiler plugin, protoc-gen-dgo, will be installed in $GOBIN, defaulting to $GOPATH/bin. It must be in your $PATH for the protocol compiler, protoc, to find it.

Once the software is installed, there are two steps to using it. First you must compile the protocol buffer definitions and then import them, with the support library, into your program.

To compile the protocol buffer definition, run protoc with the --dgo_out parameter set to the directory you want to output the Go code to.

protoc --dgo_out=. *.proto

If you are using any gogo.proto extensions you will need to specify the proto_path to include the descriptor.proto and gogo.proto. Located in github.com/dropbox/goprotoc/gogoproto and github.com/dropbox/goprotoc/protobuf respectively.

The proto package converts data structures to and from the wire format of protocol buffers. It works in concert with the Go source code generated for .proto files by the protocol compiler.

# The majority of the library code is covered by unittests. You need to configure test settings first:
make config && go test ./...

• Names are turned from camel_case to CamelCase for export.
• There are getters that return a field's value if set, and return the field's default value if unset.
• There are setters that can change the value of a field. For message fields they return a mutable pointer.
• There are adders that can add a element to a repeated field. The slice grows exponentially to optimize memory allocation.
• There are clear methods for each individual field or for a message as a whole that clear each field recursively.
• All the fields are private so the only way to get/set them is by using the api functions.
• Custom fields are supported for user defined types and string to bytes casting.
• Marshal and Unmarshal are functions to encode and decode the wire format.