Protocol Buffers
Protobuf
Proto3 syntax, wire encoding, and language guides are indexed at protobuf.dev — separate from gRPC transport specs.
What It Is
Google's language-neutral serialization IDL and wire format — the foundation of gRPC, many internal APIs, and event schemas.
Taxonomy
By topic: Language guide · Wire format · Style guide · Well-known types
Top-Level Categories
Master Catalog
Sub-Indexes & Guides
gRPC is an open-source RPC framework originally developed at Google. It uses Protocol Buffers (protobuf) as its IDL and wire format, and HTTP/2 as the transport. Now a CNCF graduated project.
View all bodies →Curated specs from Protobuf
WebP delivers smaller files than JPEG/PNG for equivalent quality — widely used for web delivery via `<picture>`, CDN transforms, and Next.js image optimization.
WebM is the default output of browser MediaRecorder and a common delivery format for open web video. EBML element structure differs from MP4 boxes.
gRPC is the dominant service-to-service RPC in polyglot microservices. Smaller payloads and faster than JSON/REST for high-throughput internal APIs.
Protobuf is the wire format for gRPC and many high-performance internal APIs. Schemas are also used for event/message contracts in Kafka/pubsub systems.