Prutal

Prutal is a pure Go alternative to protocol buffers, it covers most of the functionality offered by Protocol Buffers.

Prutal aims to minimize code generation as much as possible while ensuring serialization and maintaining good performance.

Since Prutal is NOT yet ready for production use, we are not providing usage documentation at this time, nor do we guarantee backward compatibility of the interface.

Feature Comparison

Features	Prutal	Protobuf
Supported Languages	Go	C++, Java, Python, Go, and more
Code Generation	✅	✅
Generated Code Size	😄 compact	😡 bulky
Serialization	✅	✅
Performance	⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️	⭐️⭐️⭐️
Extensibility	😄 Package	😡 Plugin
Compatibility	✅ (see Protobuf Compatibility)	✅
gRPC	✅	✅
Non-Pointer Field	✅ (aka gogoproto.nullable)	❌

Protobuf Compatibility

• ✅ Works with code generated by the official Protocol Buffer Go
• ✅ Parsing .proto file. syntax: proto2, proto3, edition 2023
• ✅ Protobuf wire format
  • double, float, bool, string, bytes
  • int32, int64, uint32, uint64, sint32, sint64
  • fixed32, fixed64, sfixed64, sfixed64
  • enum
  • repeated, map, oneof
• ✅ Packed / unpack (proto2)
  • PACKED / EXPANDED (repeated field encoding, edition2023)
• ✅ Reserved
• ✅ Unknown Fields
• ⚠️ JSON support: JSON struct tag only
• ⚠️ Code generation: Go only
• ⚠️ Protocol buffers well-known types
  • Prutal is able to generate code by reusing pkg google.golang.org/protobuf/type
  • Features of type like Any would be limited.
• ❌ Groups (proto2)
• ❌ Overriding default scalar values (proto2, edition2023)

How to use Prutal with gRPC

Use Prutal without prutalgen

All you need is

import (
    _ "github.com/cloudwego/prutal/pkg/grpccodec"
)

Use Prutal with prutalgen

check grpc test case for a full example

Contributing

Contributor guide: Contributing.

License

Prutal is licensed under the terms of the Apache license 2.0. See LICENSE for more information. Dependencies used by prutal are listed under licenses.