message Person {
  required string name = 1;
  required int32 id = 2;
  optional string email = 3;
}

What are protocol buffers?

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages.
Learn more
Person john = Person.newBuilder()
    .setId(1234)
    .setName("John Doe")
    .setEmail("jdoe@example.com")
    .build();
output = new FileOutputStream(args[0]);
john.writeTo(output);

Pick your favorite language

Protocol buffers currently support generated code in Java, Python, Objective-C, and C++. With our new proto3 language version, you can also work with Dart, Go, Ruby, and C#, with more languages to come.
C++ C# Dart Go Java Python
Person john;
fstream input(argv[1],
    ios::in | ios::binary);
john.ParseFromIstream(&input);
id = john.id();
name = john.name();
email = john.email();

How do I start?

  1. Download and install the protocol buffer compiler.
  2. Read the overview.
  3. Try the tutorial for your chosen language.