GitHub - protocolbuffers/protoscope: Protoscope is a simple, human-editable language for representing and emitting the Protobuf wire format.

Not all bugs can easily be reproduced — sometimes, all you have is a core dump from a crashing program, but no idea about the triggering conditions of the bug yet. When using Go, we can use the delve debugger for core dump debugging, but I had trouble figuring out how to save byte slice contents (for example: the incoming request causing the crash) from memory into a file for further analysis, so this article walks you through how to do it.

Explains how Protocol Buffers encodes data to files or to the wire.

Explains how Protocol Buffers encodes data to files or to the wire.

Protocol Buffers is an amazing message format. It’s incredibly compact and performant. However, these advantages come at a cost. Since Protobuf is a binary format it lacks a lot in readability compared to text-based formats like JSON or XML. If you look at encoded protobuf data it just looks like meaningless ones and zeros. However, all hope is not lost. Even if you just have a binary protobuf file with no knowledge of the corresponding protobuf file we can still get some information out of it. Let me introduce a tool called Protoscope. Protoscope is a tool for inspecting protobuf binary. It can do this with or without the protobuf files or the equivalent descriptor set (but it can do a better job with the protobuf data).

Explains how Protocol Buffers encodes data to files or to the wire.