Prototool – A Swiss Army Knife for Protocol Buffers
In another decade or so the world might replicate half of the very nice internal tools Google has.Suggestion for a project: make a tool that, given a proto description and a file that contains concatenated proto messages stored as binary strings (sort of like RecordIO at Google) lets you run simple SQL queries on the data and extract a subset of the fields from messages matching a predicate, and maybe even do simple aggregations. That was pretty handy. I really wish Google would open source some or most of this stuff. It’s not like keeping it closed source creates any kind of insurmountable competitive advantage, especially compared to the advantages that would accrue from broader adoption of protobufs.