One of the problems I have had when working with protobuf is that it is not favored by the Apache ecosystem. Apache is built around Avro instead.
So support for protobuf in Apache frameworks like for example Flink and Iceberg is always late. In some cases way too late.
Another problem is around null values. I don't have time to do the full investigation, but I remember a regression in proto3 caused us to not know whether a field was missing because it was 0 or if it was missing because it was null. Someone else may recognize it. Or possibly we misunderstood something, I don't have the full details as of now.
One of the problems I have had when working with protobuf is that it is not favored by the Apache ecosystem. Apache is built around Avro instead.
So support for protobuf in Apache frameworks like for example Flink and Iceberg is always late. In some cases way too late.
Another problem is around null values. I don't have time to do the full investigation, but I remember a regression in proto3 caused us to not know whether a field was missing because it was 0 or if it was missing because it was null. Someone else may recognize it. Or possibly we misunderstood something, I don't have the full details as of now.