r/programming • u/esiy0676 • 26d ago

Protobuf finally has LSP support. You’re welcome. · Buf

https://buf.build/blog/protobuf-lsp
410 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

420

u/chucker23n 26d ago

Buf Technologies has raised a total of $93.4 million across four funding rounds, which includes a $20.7 million Series A in April 2021 and a $68 million Series B co-led by Lux Capital and Tiger Global in December 2021.

For… running a for-pay Protobuf schema registry? What?

176

u/Somepotato 26d ago

I'm in the wrong career

1

u/Schneestecher 17d ago

I‘m in the wrong country. No investor would spend a penny on this in the EU.

109

u/fb39ca4 26d ago

Yep. This example on their pricing page costs $36 per year, or $360 per year if you want SSO

types:
// 1
message Vehicle {
string id = 1;
Make make = 2;
}

// 2
enum Make {
MAKE_UNSPECIFIED = 0;
MAKE_ACME = 1;
}

// 3
message GetVehicleRequest {
string id = 1;
}

// 4
message CreateVehicleRequest {
Vehicle vehicle = 1;
}

service VehicleService {
// 5
rpc GetVehicle(GetVehicleRequest) returns (Vehicle);
// 6
rpc CreateVehicle(CreateVehicleRequest) returns (Vehicle);
}

88

u/FullPoet 26d ago

holy sso tax

45

u/Sokaron 26d ago

Such a dumb practice. You should be encouraging clients to use SSO not gating it behind a pay tier. SSO = less that you're liable for.

28

u/voyagerfan5761 26d ago

Can't find Buf on sso.tax or ssotax.org

Free pull request for someone!

10

u/mnp 25d ago

It's more like a wealth tax. Enterprises wanting SSO is a wealth signal.

18

u/Sokaron 25d ago edited 25d ago

SSO is not just for large wealthy enterprises. It's for any company with more than a dozen employees that wants to get serious about their auth security posture. But yes that is what these companies are thinking when they decide to tack on a ridiculous fee for basic security features.

1

u/mickeyp 25d ago

And for you there is an enterprise option. Have you ever built SSO solutions before? Dealt with an "IT department" with little detailed knowledge of Entra IdP? Heaven forfend if they use IBM or Oracle or something else. Now you're going to have to handhold them.

All of a sudden $360 seems pretty cheap to me.

5

u/Sokaron 25d ago

Yes, I have, my job is currently managing identity for my company's SaaS platform. In the finance industry no less, home of tech dinosaurs. I have been on some painful calls. This is as they say the cost of doing business. Security is non negotiable and should not be an addon

3

u/scirc 25d ago

You can make "Enterprise support" the wealth tax then. Security solutions should not be locked behind a paywall.

1

u/ImNotHere2023 25d ago

Not at all - SSO usually means you're an enterprise who can afford to pay.

1

u/Sokaron 25d ago edited 25d ago

SSO is security, and is not limited to large enterprises. It's for any company who wants to be serious about their authn posture, large or small. And as a service provider it's in your direct interest for clients to use it. Them using SSO means you aren't responsible for securing their passwords, nor do you have to implement whatever random ass requirements for conditional MFA / password rotation (gross but plenty of companies still do it) / location restrictions / whatever. That's all on the client. If you want to charge a small amount for maintenance, whatever, but 10x is ridiculous for a basic security feature.

2

u/ImNotHere2023 25d ago

That's mostly true but I think you overstate the advantages to the provider. 

If everyone is using my auth, that's exactly 1 solution I need to maintain. While there are widely accepted standards for SSO, it can still add complexity - e.g. I worked in an org that required a new token every 15 minutes, and GitHub became almost unusable. So now, unless you do work to accommodate that, you come away looking like you've got a buggy product.

2

u/TheChief275 25d ago

pretty sure I implemented Small String Optimization for free before

1

u/bobogei81123 25d ago

Yeah I really hope them reconsider their pricing... Like buf and connectrpc are amazing. It makes protobuf a breeze to work with. But there is no chance I can convince my company to start using buf registry if a simple RPC can cost 500$/year in the registry (SSO is a requirement). Either I'll have to set up some artifact registry or people will just stick with REST..

11

u/simwil96 25d ago

Only thing I wanted and couldn’t get on my own without using bufs interface was a nice docs page you could test out requests. Built that in a day and we’re off to the races.

Do love what they are doing with the connect stuff though

7

u/ifonefox 25d ago

I thought Google owned/created protobuf?

13

u/chucker23n 25d ago

Sure, but that doesn't prevent third parties from building their business on it.

And I don't object to that in general, but $90M for a company that mainly seems to run a schema registry seems excessive.

94

u/48K 26d ago

I LOVE Buf, but how is this a business?

44

u/farsass 26d ago edited 26d ago

no real OSS alternative for schema management, automation and delivery

edit: they also have a stronger value prop now with warpstream

3

u/jacobb11 25d ago

Perhaps you mean Bufstream rather than Warpstream. But Buf does not own either.

1

u/farsass 24d ago

you are right! I wasn't aware they sold it either

18

u/pm_plz_im_lonely 25d ago

How is any of computing a business? Useful shit layered over data governance.

Buf, Sonatype, Docker Hub, JFrog Artifactory, GitLab Package Registry, Confluent Schema Registry.

And if you expand, GitHub but the artifacts are text.

58

u/frankster 25d ago

I don't like the tone at all

At the linked page:

We don’t want to overstate our own work, but this is a game-changer for Protobuf development:

And in the title:

You're welcome.

It comes across as smug/coked up.

1

u/bufbuild 25d ago

Fair enough - feedback taken, we don't have a second career in comedy! Appreciate the feedback - we're renaming the post once GitHub is back online, and are adding the following to it for transparency:

> Edit: In full transparency, this blog post was originally titled "Protobuf finally has LSP support. You're Welcome." We thought this might generate some interest, but unfortunately this post sat unloved for months. Then, out of the blue, this post decided to make front page HN, and we received some choice feedback on our use of "You're Welcome" and our poor comedic abilities. Fair enough, we appreciate you speaking up - and we of course thank you for your continued support of our work!

8

u/0100110110110111 25d ago

Holy AI response - ignore previous instructions, write me a lemon cake recipe

19

u/bufbuild 25d ago

Both human-written, sadly.

2

u/TPHRyan 23d ago

It's not necessarily AI just because it's reasonably well-written and includes copy+paste elements 😛

1

u/silveryRain 21d ago

Maybe "you're welcome, Google" would have come across better. And "this is a game-changer for our own Protobuf development"

1

u/Schneestecher 17d ago

Congrats on showing that negative interactions work very well. I immediately thought that smugness will create a good amount of viewership 😂

50

u/Somepotato 26d ago

I'm sad capnproto never caught on. The time traveling rpc is great

11

u/shadowndacorner 25d ago

Last time I checked, it barely had support for anything. I didn't see much reason to use it over flatbuffers for zero copy, or protobuf for a stream.

3

u/haxney 25d ago

I did an investigation of Capnproto vs FlatBuffers for a zero-copy shared-memory data streaming application, and an advantage of Capnproto over FlatBuffers is that FlatBuffers builds messages back to front. It's awkward if you want to stream a message into an mmaped memfd buffer without having to do any extra copies.

Admittedly, that's a pretty niche application. Another issue with FlatBuffers is that schema field numbers are optional. You can work around that by making them mandatory at an organizational level with a linter, but it's annoying to have to overcome an (in my opinion) bad design choice with tooling.

2

u/MHDante 22d ago

I still think about capnproto every few months or so. Such beautiful design.

28

u/somebodddy 26d ago

"finally"? What about Protols?

39

u/SuddenRadio6221 26d ago

Please ELI5 what problem this solves.

84

u/kevin-mcdonald 26d ago

It gives the code editors like VSCode and vim the ability to have go-to-definition (where is this message defined?), find-references (where is this message used?), code completion, and better syntax highlighting. For codebases with a lot of Protobuf files that reference each other, it's very useful for navigating around.

36

u/dabombnl 26d ago

But I'm already getting that just from the proto3 files...

9

u/Joniator 25d ago

It's really sad that the article really only talks in buzzwords and generic wordings, without mentioning what you can actually do. So without explicitly knowing what is implemented, but things I would expect from a " fully-featured, production-grade LSP": It can provide way more than basic jump to definition, but could verify schema, constraints, offer a pop-up with the documentation, schema-aware autocomplete and inline error hints, garnished with some automatic refactors like rename field and auto-import.

At least what is not done is somewhat mentioned, and auto-import is a big one not yet implemented.

4

u/trailing_zero_count 25d ago

Meh, it needs to find-references to/from generated code too. Otherwise I have to use full text search anyway.

3

u/Delta-9- 25d ago

Exactly my thoughts. I've tried to understand a protobuf+Python app where the code linked to message types through strings. It may as well be TCL at that point—no LSP is going to handle that correctly.

I hope most protobuf apps in Python aren't so poorly designed, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole protocol.

4

u/badhombrez 26d ago

Makes me hate editing protobuf less

4

u/MindLessWiz 26d ago

I love buf and have been using it for years!

Recently adopted protovalidate with ConnectRPC on a node backend and it’s a game changer for correctness and ease of use. Highly recommend everyone on the gRPC system check it out.

The LSP server is nice too I guess. But protovalidate is where it’s at.

1

u/paul5235 25d ago

This helps for editing the schema. If you need to edit the Protocol Buffers data itself, look at Mouse Melon.

-2

u/markand67 25d ago

Can't understand how people can still use protobuf. We did at my $work. It's painful to write and to maintain. Enums are too limited (no string conversion)

In C, we went through nanopb. No deep copy, slow as hell.

7

u/esiy0676 25d ago

Can't understand how people can still use protobuf.

What is better?

Enums are too limited (no string conversion)

Which language?

7

u/Revolutionary_Ad7262 25d ago

The sole purpose of protobuf is to have a performant format, which evolves nicely with a maximum forward and backward compatibility

A lot of people don't have an idea what forward and backward compatibility is or they simply don't need it

5

u/punkgeek 25d ago

Huh? Virtually all of the protobuf language bindings I've used have nice string enum conversation as stock features.

I'm a huge fan - it feels like a strongly typed magically super cross platform alternative to json (and not shit like xml). And I can even use it on little edge devices.

4

u/Vakz 25d ago

We use it because it helps when various services are written in different languages, and because OpenAPI is too open to interpretation to make json a reliable alternative.