Hi all, The protobuf library used in Prometheus, gogo/protobuf <https://github.com/gogo/protobuf>, is no longer actively maintained (activity largely stopped pre-2020, looking for new ownership <https://github.com/gogo/protobuf/issues/691>). Along with that, many of the performance boosts that are provided by gogo have been addressed in the official Go lib, golang/protobuf <https://github.com/golang/protobuf>, as of v1.4.0 <https://blog.golang.org/protobuf-apiv2>.
Many projects that used gogo/protobuf have since switched to the official lib (ex: Istio <https://github.com/istio/istio/pull/17132>, Envoyproxy <https://github.com/envoyproxy/go-control-plane/issues/213>), largely for eco-system compatibility reasons now that performance is not a factor. The gogo-compiled protobufs are not compatible with any golang-compiled protobufs, and vice-versa. This makes consuming external protobuf APIs impossible unless they also maintain a gogo version, which is not common. I'm wondering if anyone has done work in this area recently, and if the community agrees it's a net benefit switching to the official golang/protobuf implementation. *What this would mean for Prometheus* Looking at the history of protobuf in Prometheus, it seems like both golang/protobuf and gogo/protobuf were until the end of 2017, when it then made sense to consolidate onto gogo (#3346 <https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/issues/3346>) (#3394 <https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/pull/3394>). As noted in the above issues, the official golang/protobuf package is still present in vendored files, so it is just the Prometheus protos that would need to be updated. The build procedures (mainly scripts/genproto.sh <https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/blob/75e505babb9bbcefd8849e945814d35c7ce97e9f/scripts/genproto.sh>) have not changed much since the 2017 shift, so the work would be mainly adjusting this back to use golang/protobuf and recompiling the `prompb` package. Does anyone know of other necessary changes/ complications that I'm missing? Thanks all for your time, Austin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Prometheus Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/38caa51d-e88a-489b-a045-54144cd1a03fn%40googlegroups.com.
