[ANN] lua-pb Lua Protocol Buffers

["Robert G. Jakabosky" <bobby@...>]

Announcing lua-pb [1] a Lua implementation of Google's Protocol Buffers [2].

What are protocol buffers?
Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated 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.

lua-pb uses LPeg for parsing .proto [3] definition files and dynamically 
generates message objects from the message definition.  The encoder/decoder 
code uses modules 'struct' [4] & Lua BitOp [5].

One of the main features that separates lua-pb from the other two 
implementations [6] of Protocol Buffers for Lua, is that it doesn't require 
static compiling of message definitions to native code.  lua-pb dynamically 
compiles message definitions at runtime.

See the test_media.lua [7] script for an example on how to use lua-pb.

Also lua-pb is designed with a flexible backend so a specialized backend can 
be created for LuaJIT to make encoding/decoding faster.  I haven't benchmarked 
the current backend, but it should be reasonably efficient.

1. https://github.com/Neopallium/lua-pb
2. http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html
3. https://github.com/Neopallium/lua-pb/blob/master/protos/media.proto
4. http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/struct/
5. http://bitop.luajit.org/
6. http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/wiki/ThirdPartyAddOns
7. https://github.com/Neopallium/lua-pb/blob/master/tests/test_media.lua

-- 
Robert G. Jakabosky