Beijing time on July 8th, according to foreign media reports, Google released the open source data description language "Protocol Buffers" inside the company on Monday.

Protocol Buffers is similar to XML, but its characteristics are simple, compact and fast.

Google's open source project manager Chris Dibona (Chris DiBonap) said in his blog, "almost all structured information stored on the network or stored on disk is used in this language.

We think that Protocol Buffers is also good for others, so we decided to publish it as an open source software.

Google Software Engineer Kenton Varda (Kenton Varda) on the company's open source blog website said that Google uses thousands of different data formats, most of which are structured data formats.

Using XML to deal with these massive structured data seems inadequate, so Google developed Protocol Buffers.

Varda compared Protocol Buffers to an interface description language (IDL), but without the complexity of IDL.

Varda said, "one of the main design objectives of Protocol Buffers is simplicity, and so is the actual situation.

Protocol Buffers is not only powerful, but also at least an order of magnitude faster than XML. "

According to Google documents, compared with comparable XML files, the Protocol Buffers file is 2-9 times smaller and 19-99 times faster.

Google also said it plans to release more other software projects as open source software in the future.

Because these projects will use Protocol Buffers, so first publish Protocol Buffers.