I don't know what your metric for reliability is... but I would say that the messaging / serialization format can hardly be blamed for reliability problems s.a. service uptime or service responsiveness etc. Such problems usually arise at a level where details like the choice of messaging format are not important.

Messaging format may affect application performance though. It would affect metrics s.a. throughput or bandwidth.

In a way that is more difficult to measure, a messaging format can affect the number of bugs created by developer using it and indirectly the delivery times. But this can be mitigated by tooling (i.e. Protobuf isn't self-documenting, so if you don't have the schema files, you can't interpret the messages, but you can write a tool that you can feed the schema definitions and then use the tool to interpret the messages).

> It's one of the few things Google _hasn't_ deprecated

You might be unaware of it, but there were Protobuf v1, v2, and now we are at v3. Even though it's not documented, v3 supports most of v2, but not all of it (I think v1 was never used outside of Google itself). Google never properly released Protobuf, so, they can't really deprecate it. Even their formal grammar is full of errors.

> Why does it matter for some Python implementation if the Google C++ implementation has a lazy or eager parser?

I wrote about it in my repository, but I'll try to summarize it here: Protobuf is full of bad ideas. One such bad idea is that message fields are allowed to repeat and that the last field wins. So, if you were to write a SAX parser, you'd have a dilemma with how to handle this bizarre idea: do you accept that a callback for some property might be triggered multiple times or do you read the whole message ahead of time and then call callbacks exactly once for each property? If we accept that the parser must be lazy, we "solve" this problem by allowing the parser to read ahead (it needs to do this anyways), but this is a wasteful way to parse (uses more memory than necessary).

> The important part of protobuf is the spec of the wire format. That is what makes the standard an interop format.

I'm not sure what are you trying to say here. All messaging formats are made up of... wire format, that's what they are for. Maybe I'm not seeing it?

> Personally I also prefer code generation over dynamic parsers and generators.

I think you are trying to say that you prefer source code generation over generating supporting definitions at runtime? I wasn't talking about dynamic parser generation (eg. Lark). In my case, the parser was hand-written (using Bison + Flex) and compiled ahead of time, but the Python definitions supporting the Protobuf IML were generated at runtime.

If my guess is true, I'd like to hear your arguments in favor of generating Python source code that translates Protobuf IML into Python. To me it looks like a waste of space on disk... I really can't think of any reason to want that.

I don't know where you get the confidence... When it comes to Protobuf, we are now at version 3 of the format. It's been around for a while, but I'm old enough to have implemented v2 parser myself... v2 is partially supported in v3, even though the support isn't documented. But, emphasis on partially. Some things are no longer there.

So... I'd say that your faith is unfounded. And, in general, there's no reason to believe that a commercial entity will commit to supporting any particular technology if that doesn't generate them a profit. Standard is better.

It's like in that meme: it's not enough to say it, you need to declare it.

Or, in other words, what makes a standard a standard is that you declare that it is a standard. This declaration carries with it an obligation to respect the standard for ever and ever (like C89), regardless of whether in retrospect you realize you've made mistakes and want to fix them, or maybe wanting to add more stuff etc.

Having a standard is restrictive and uncomfortable for the designers, that's why many opt not to have a standard. Eg. Rust language doesn't have a standard (even though you may, of course, find documents detailing how it works), same for Python, Java and many other popular languages.

Maybe He means because it diesen have an accepted rfc