C++ equivalent to SerializeWithLengthPrefix

Question

I built a communication library using Protocol Buffers (protobuf-net) using Sockets (TcpListener and TcpClient) and it is working fine, but now a co-worker needs to write a library to communicate with my software using C++.

Turns out that I'm using the Serializer.NonGeneric.SerializeWithLengthPrefix and Serializer.NonGeneric.TryDeserializeWithLengthPrefix.

Are there equivalent functions in the protobuf C++ libraries? If not, anyone knows how to implement it, or have it implemented to share?

Answer 1

I'm not hugely familiar with the C++ API; but the length prefix itself is pretty simple if you write the data to a buffer first, especially if you use the fixed-width 32-bit encoding (rather than base-128 variable-length). See also this thread on the google-groups forum.