What are the most noticable differences between Google Protocol Buffers and ASN.1 (with PER-encoding)? For my project the most imporant issue is the size of the serialized data. Has anyone done any data-size comparisons between the two?
+3
A:
It's a long time since I've done any ASN.1 work, but the size is very likely to depend on the details of your types and actual data.
I would strongly recommend that you prototype both and put some real data in to compare.
If your protocol buffer would contain repeated primitive types, you should look at the latest source in Subversion for Protocol Buffers - they can be represented in a "packed" format now which is much more space-efficient. (My C# port has just caught up with this feature, some time last week.)
Jon Skeet
2009-02-27 15:49:04