43 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
43 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
Readme for the C#/.NET implementation of Protocol Buffers
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Copyright 2008 Google Inc.
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http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/
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and
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http://github.com/jskeet/dotnet-protobufs
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(This will eventually be written up into a full tutorial etc.)
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Differences with respect to the Java API
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----------------------------------------
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Many of the changes are obvious "making it more like .NET", but
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others are more subtle.
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o Properties and indexers are used reasonably extensively.
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o newFoo becomes CreateFoo everywhere.
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o Classes are broken up much more - for instance, there are
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namespaces for descriptors and field accessors, just to make it
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easier to see what's going on.
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o There's a mixture of generic and non-generic code. This
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is interesting (at least if you're a language nerd). Java's generics
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are somewhat different to those of .NET, partly due to type erasure
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but in other ways too. .NET allows types to be overloaded by the
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number of generic parameters, but there's no such thing as the
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"raw" type of a generic type. Combining these two facts, I've
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ended up with two interfaces for messages, and two for builders -
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in each case, a non-generic one and a generic one which derives
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from the generic one. Where the members clash (e.g. IBuilder.Build
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and IBuilder<TMessage>.Build vary only by return type) the
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implementations use explicit interface implementation to provide
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the most useful method in most cases. This is very much like
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the normal implementation of IEnumerable<T> which extends
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IEnumerable. As an aside, this becomes a pain when trying to
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create "the read-only version of this list, whose type I don't
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know but I know it's a List<something>". Oh for mumble types.
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o Nested types always end up under a "Types" static class which
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is merely present to avoid name clashes.
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o FileDescriptor.FindByName has been made generic to allow simple
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type-safe searching for any nested type.
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o No enum.valueOf for enums (due to them being simple C# enums)
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o Public Builder constructors to aid C# object/collection initializers
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