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Copyright 2008 Google Inc.

https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

Protocol Buffers (a.k.a., protobuf) are Google's language-neutral,platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. Youcan findprotobuf's documentation on the Google Developers site.

This README file contains protobuf installation instructions. To installprotobuf, you need to install the protocol compiler (used to compile .protofiles) and the protobuf runtime for your chosen programming language.

The protocol compiler is written in C++. If you are using C++, please followtheC++ Installation Instructions to install protoc alongwith the C++ runtime.

For non-C++ users, the simplest way to install the protocol compiler is todownload a pre-built binary from our release page:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases

In the downloads section of each release, you can find pre-built binaries inzip packages: protoc-$VERSION-$PLATFORM.zip. It contains the protoc binaryas well as a set of standard .proto files distributed along with protobuf.

If you are looking for an old version that is not available in the releasepage, check out the maven repo here:

https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/google/protobuf/protoc/

These pre-built binaries are only provided for released versions. If you wantto use the github master version at HEAD, or you need to modify protobuf code,or you are using C++, it's recommended to build your own protoc binary fromsource.

If you would like to build protoc binary from source, see theC++ InstallationInstructions.

Protobuf supports several different programming languages. For each programminglanguage, you can find instructions in the corresponding source directory abouthow to install protobuf runtime for that specific language:

The best way to learn how to use protobuf is to follow the tutorials in ourdeveloper guide:

https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/tutorials

If you want to learn from code examples, take a look at the examples in theexamples directory.

The complete documentation for Protocol Buffers is available via theweb at:

https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/