I'm new to protobuf. I need to serialize complex graph-like structure and share it between C++ and Python clients. I'm trying to apply protobuf because: It is language agnostic, has generators both for C++ and Python It is binary. I can't afford text formats because my data structure is quite large But Protobuf user guide says: Protocol Buffers are not designed to handle large messages. As a general rule of thumb, if you are dealing in messages larger than a megabyte each, it may be time to consider an alternate strategy. https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/techniques#large-data I have graph-like structures that are sometimes up to 1 Gb in size, way above 1 Mb. Why protobuf is bad for serializing large datasets? What should I use instead? Continue reading...
