Protobuf Wire Format
The Protobuf wire format is the binary encoding scheme of Protocol Buffers: fields are serialized compactly as a (field_number, wire_type) tag plus a variable-length value.
Purpose
It provides efficient, backward-compatible structured data serialization inside Google and in gRPC.
Mechanism
Each field is encoded as a Varint tag (field_number<<3 | wire_type) followed by the value. The wire type determines the value encoding: 0 = Varint, 1 = 64-bit, 2 = length-delimited, 5 = 32-bit. Unknown fields are preserved to support schema evolution.
Use cases
- gRPC transport encoding
- Structured data storage
- Mobile communication