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Protocol Buffers VS Dhall Configuration Language

Compare Protocol Buffers VS Dhall Configuration Language and see what are their differences

Protocol Buffers logo Protocol Buffers

A method for serializing and interchanging structured data.

Dhall Configuration Language logo Dhall Configuration Language

A non-repetitive alternative to YAML
  • Protocol Buffers Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-02
  • Dhall Configuration Language Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-04-27

Protocol Buffers features and specs

  • Efficiency
    Protocol Buffers are designed to be compact and efficient, using less space compared to other serialization formats like XML or JSON. This efficiency benefits both storage and network transmission.
  • Backward and Forward Compatibility
    Protocol Buffers support easy schema evolution. New fields can be added to your protocol without breaking existing deployed programs that are compiled with an older version of the protocol.
  • Performance
    They offer fast serialization and deserialization, which can significantly improve performance in applications where speed is critical.
  • Language Support
    Protocol Buffers are supported in multiple programming languages, making them flexible for use in diverse tech stacks and across different systems.
  • Type Safety
    With Protocol Buffers, schemas are strictly defined, which provides a level of type safety compared to text-based formats like JSON or XML.

Possible disadvantages of Protocol Buffers

  • Learning Curve
    The initial setup and understanding of Protocol Buffers can be complex for those who are not familiar with binary serialization formats.
  • Debugging Difficulty
    Because Protocol Buffers use a compact and binary format, debugging can be more challenging compared to human-readable formats like JSON or XML.
  • Limited Human Readability
    As a binary format, Protocol Buffers are not easily readable without decoding, which can complicate manual inspection of data during development or troubleshooting.
  • Third-Party Dependency
    Using Protocol Buffers often requires integrating additional libraries into your project, which can introduce dependencies that need to be maintained.
  • Tooling Overhead
    The use of Protocol Buffers requires a compilation step and the generation of code from .proto files, which adds complexity and build-time overhead.

Dhall Configuration Language features and specs

  • Deterministic
    Dhall is designed to be a deterministic configuration language, meaning that given the same input, it will always produce the same output. This ensures consistency and repeatability across environments.
  • Type-Safe
    Dhall includes a strong static type system, preventing many common errors associated with misconfigurations. Types are checked at compile time, ensuring configuration values meet specific criteria before deployment.
  • Total Programming Language
    Unlike many other configuration languages, Dhall is a total functional programming language, which means every program written in Dhall will terminate. This prevents infinite loops and other runtime issues.
  • Interoperability
    Dhall can generate JSON, YAML, and other data interchange formats, making it highly interoperable with existing systems that require these formats for configuration.
  • Modular
    Dhall allows for modular configuration files. You can define reusable components and import them across different configurations, promoting DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principles.

Possible disadvantages of Dhall Configuration Language

  • Learning Curve
    While Dhall is designed to be simple, the presence of a type system and functional programming concepts can present a learning curve to new users, especially those without a programming background.
  • Tooling Support
    Compared to more established languages, Dhall has less tooling support. Users might find fewer IDE extensions, plugins, or community libraries to assist in development.
  • Limited Ecosystem
    Being relatively new, Dhall has a smaller ecosystem that may lack the breadth of community contributions, such as templates and integration examples, found in more mature configuration languages.
  • Performance Overhead
    The type checking and interpretation of Dhall can introduce some performance overhead compared to more traditional configuration formats like JSON or YAML, which are simpler to parse.
  • Complexity for Simple Configurations
    For simple configurations, the added complexity of Dhall's type system and functional features may be unnecessary, leading to overhead without a clear benefit.

Protocol Buffers videos

Protocol Buffers- A Banked Journey - Christopher Reeves

More videos:

  • Review - justforfunc #30: The Basics of Protocol Buffers
  • Review - Complete Introduction to Protocol Buffers 3 : How are Protocol Buffers used?

Dhall Configuration Language videos

No Dhall Configuration Language videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Protocol Buffers and Dhall Configuration Language)
Configuration Management
24 24%
76% 76
Web Servers
100 100%
0% 0
Software Development
0 0%
100% 100
Developer Tools
23 23%
77% 77

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Dhall Configuration Language should be more popular than Protocol Buffers. It has been mentiond 91 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Protocol Buffers mentions (23)

  • Pulumi Gestalt 0.0.1 released
    A schema.json converter for easier ingestion (likely supporting Avro and Protobuf). - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Understanding Protocol Buffers: A Fast Alternative to JSON
    Protocol Buffers Documentation Protobuf Json JSON in API Development. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • gRPC: what is it? An introduction...
    For our luck, Go is one of the 11 languages with official libraries. It is important to say that the framework uses Protocol Buffer to serialize the message. The first step then is to install locally the protobuf and its Go plugins:. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Why should we use Protobuf in Web API as data transfer protocol.
    Note: Clients and services will ignore field numbers they do not recognize. For more details about Protobuf, visit protobuf.dev. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • JSON vs FlatBuffers vs Protocol Buffers
    Protobuf (Protocol Buffers), created by Google, is, according to the official website :. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
View more

Dhall Configuration Language mentions (91)

  • Any program can be a GitHub Actions shell
    I'll give a shot at some guiding principals: 1. Do not use yaml. All github action logic should be written in a language that compiles to yaml, for example dhall (https://dhall-lang.org/). Yaml is an awful language for programmers, and it's a worse language for non-programmers. It's good for no one. 2. To the greatest extent possible, do not use any actions which install things. For example, don't use... - Source: Hacker News / 30 days ago
  • StrictYAML
    I'm a fan of anything that moves us away from stringly typed nonsense. See also Dhall (which can render to yaml). I like the idea but found the veneer broke a little too often and left me squinting at Haskell. https://dhall-lang.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Some Programming Language Ideas
    I think you're asking for Starlark (https://starlark-lang.org), a language that strongly resembles Python but isn't Turing-complete, originally designed at Google for use in their build system. There's also Dhall (https://dhall-lang.org), which targets configuration use cases; I'm less familiar with it. One problem is that, while non-Turing-completeness can be helpful for maintainability, it's not really... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • 8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production
    > Lambda calculus is as pure as can be, and also has terms that don't normalize. That is not considered a side effect. Many typed lambda calculi do normalise. You can also have a look https://dhall-lang.org/ for some pragmatic that normalises. > A better example of impurity in Haskell for pragmatic's sake is the trace function, that can be used to print debugging information from pure functions. Well, but that's... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Thoughts on ThoughtWorks Radar 2024
    I was first turned onto Pkl during my Dhall Trough of Disillusionment phase (Dhall is cool, but man is it hard) by James Ward. It looked to be a language that had enough types to compile YAML/JSON configuration files wayyyy more safely. I’ve had enough YAML/JSON misconfigurations break production, that I started looking into ways to compile those problems away, and Dhall helped a lot, but the learning curve and... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Protocol Buffers and Dhall Configuration Language, you can also consider the following products

Messagepack - An efficient binary serialization format.

YAML - YAML 1.2 --- YAML: YAML Ain't Markup Language

TOML - TOML - Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language

Jsonnet - A powerful DSL for elegant description of JSON data.

gRPC - Application and Data, Languages & Frameworks, Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and Service Discovery

JSON - (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format