Protobuf (Protocol Buffers)

Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a method developed by Google for efficiently encoding structured data, making it easy to serialize (convert into a compact format) and deserialize (reconstruct). It’s used for communication between different systems or components, often over networks or for storage. Protobuf defines data structures using a simple language, and then automatically generates code to handle the encoding and decoding. Its main benefits are producing smaller, faster data representations compared to formats like JSON or XML, optimizing performance and bandwidth in distributed systems and applications.