protoc support

[steeve]

Hi,

First of all, congratulations, this looks great!
Would you be open to protoc support? It's mostly https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/google/protobuf/descriptor.proto on stdin and file contents on stdout.

This would ease support for other build systems, most notably regarding well known types.

Cheers,

[batsuev]

Thanks for the feedback! 👋
Just to break this down clearly - we're looking at two key pieces:

• A protoc-style binary that handles proto -> zig
• protobuf "stdlib" (for well-known types) in gremlin library module

[gwenzek]

Hi, answering for @steeve since he's a bit busy.

We're talking about protoc plugins for a specific language.
What protoc does to handle all languages is that it convert a .proto file into a binary "FileDescriptorProto",
then it passes the "FileDescriptorProto" to a plugin responsible to generate source code.

This plugin is what zig-protobuf implements in https://github.com/Arwalk/zig-protobuf/blob/master/bootstrapped-generator/main.zig#L102-L110

We could contribute a similar plugin that take a FileDescriptorProto and output a .zig file similar to what gremlin generates already.

I've already forked https://github.com/gwenzek/zig-protobuf to make it generate one .zig file for each .proto, and use modules for imports instead of using relative imports, as well as simplifying a bit the generated code.
So I'm familiar with the problem.

Personally I prefer the API generated by gremlin, so that's why we consider switching to it, and we can contribute the missing piece. But if you feel this is beyond your original goals, we can also do this in a separate repository.

[batsuev]

@gwenzek Thanks for the details. Yes, I think adding optional protoc support would be a valuable addition