Protocol buffers and encoding and decoding techniques in Go language

Go language is a popular statically typed programming language, especially suitable for high-performance, high-concurrency network application development. In web applications, data serialization and deserialization is very critical because information needs to be exchanged in some format between different systems.

The Go language provides a lightweight data exchange format called Protocol Buffers, which was developed by Google and is widely used for data exchange in distributed systems. The protocol buffer is a language-independent and platform-independent binary data format that can greatly improve the efficiency of data transmission and reduce the workload of developers.

In this article, we will discuss protocol buffers and encoding and decoding techniques in the Go language to help readers better understand and use this feature to simplify network application development.

Protocol Buffer

Protocol Buffer is a lightweight data exchange format that uses a simple interface to describe the data structure and serializes the data into a binary format through encoding. Protocol buffers are often used in network applications to exchange data between different systems. Its main advantages are as follows:

• Language independent: The protocol buffer supports multiple programming languages, and its description file is represented in text format.
• Compactness: The encoding of the protocol buffer is very compact, which can greatly reduce the use of network bandwidth during data transmission.
• Extensibility: Protocol buffers support changing data structures without affecting existing parsing code.

The following is a simple example of using the protocol buffer:

Define the protocol buffer format file

The protocol buffer format file is represented by the .proto file extension text file representation. For example, the following .proto file defines a simple message that contains a string field named Name and an integer field named Age:

syntax = "proto3";

message Person {
  string Name = 1;
  int32 Age = 2;
}

By defining a protocol buffer format file, you can describe The structure and type of the data and generates code for serializing and deserializing the data.

Generate Go language code

After defining the .proto file, you need to use the protoc tool to compile it into Go language code. First, you need to install the protoc tool:

$ wget https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases/download/v3.15.8/protoc-3.15.8-linux-x86_64.zip
$ unzip protoc-3.15.8-linux-x86_64.zip -d protoc3
$ sudo mv protoc3/bin/* /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo mv protoc3/include/* /usr/local/include/

Then, we can use the following command to generate Go language code:

$ protoc --go_out=. person.proto

The generated Go language code is as follows:

// Code generated by protoc-gen-go. DO NOT EDIT.
// source: person.proto

package main

import (
  "fmt"
  "proto"
  "bufio"
  "os"
)

func main() {
  person := &proto.Person{Name: "John", Age: 30}

  // Encode to binary format
  data, err := proto.Marshal(person)
  if err != nil {
    fmt.Println("Error:", err)
  }

  // Decode from binary format
  newPerson := &proto.Person{}
  err = proto.Unmarshal(data, newPerson)
  if err != nil {
    fmt.Println("Error:", err)
  }

  fmt.Println("Name:", newPerson.Name)
  fmt.Println("Age:", newPerson.Age)
}

In In the above example, we first create a Person structure object and fill in its fields. We then serialize the object into binary format and save it in the data variable. Finally, we deserialize it into a new Person structure object and print it out.

Coding and decoding skills

When using the protocol buffer, we need to master some basic coding and decoding skills in order to better use this function. Some encoding and decoding tips are listed below:

1. Converting Format

Before serializing the message into binary format, we may need to convert some fields to different format. For example, we might need to convert a string to a byte array and a number to a fixed-length string. After converting it to binary format, we can use the same technique to restore it to its original format.

2. Multiple Messages

The protocol buffer supports serializing multiple messages into the same binary array. This is typically used to send multiple messages to avoid the overhead of creating multiple sockets. When decoding, we need to iterate through the entire binary array to split it into multiple messages.

3. Optional fields

The protocol buffer supports marking certain fields as optional. These fields may not exist, if the field does not exist a default value is used instead. While coding, we need to check if each optional field exists and serialize it into a binary array only if it exists. When decoding, we need to check if each field has been marked as present and only restore it to the message object if it exists.

Conclusion

In this article, we introduced protocol buffers and encoding and decoding techniques in the Go language. By using protocol buffers, we can exchange data between different systems more easily and greatly improve the performance and efficiency of network applications. We also introduced some basic encoding and decoding techniques that can help us better use protocol buffers in real applications. I hope that readers can gain a deeper understanding of protocol buffers and encoding and decoding techniques through this article, and be able to use these techniques to develop more efficient and reliable network applications.

The above is the detailed content of Protocol buffers and encoding and decoding techniques in Go language. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!