Prerequisites

You can find the code for this chapter at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/gRPC-Go-for-Professionals/tree/main/chapter2. In this chapter, we are going to discuss how Protocol Buffers serializes and deserializes data. While this can be done by writing code, we are going to stay away from that in order to learn how to use the protoc compiler to debug and optimize our Protobuf schemas. Thus, if you want to reproduce the examples specified, you will need to download the protoc compiler from the Protobuf GitHub Releases page (https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases). The easiest way to get started is to download the binary releases. These releases are named with this convention: protoc-${VERSION}-${OS}-{ARCHITECTURE}. Uncompress the zip file and follow the readme.txt instructions (note: we do intend to use Well-Known Types in the future so make sure you also install the includes). After that, you should be able to run the following command:

$ protoc --version

Finally, as always, you will be able to find the companion code in the GitHub repository under the folder for the current chapter (chapter2).