Protobuf support in version 7.x

[chemhack]

We are trying to use Protobuf serialization in version 7.x, however ProtobufSerializer is only available in version 3.x.

Is there any plan to make it available in version 7.x as well?

[bradygaster]

@adityamandaleeka, this feels like a good idea.

[ReubenBond]

@chemhack, are you looking for Google.ProtocolBuffers or protobuf-net support? We could add support for either or both, like we support JSON today. Largely, I wanted to wait until someone requested it rather than speculatively create one or both packages.

[chemhack]

@ReubenBond thanks for the response. we are looking support of Google.ProtocolBuffers. The use case we are looking at is reuse the same serialized classes in existing GRPC services, so that we don't have to create another set of data models and do the extra mapping.

[larsfjerm]

Here's a proposal: https://gist.github.com/larsfjerm/6b393353e8bbb611c2960dd1600777fc

I refactored it from https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/blob/main/src/Serializers/Orleans.Serialization.Protobuf/ProtobufSerializer.cs

[abe545]

I just want to add my +1 for this feature. Without it, we're blocked from upgrading our various orleans based services to v7, since we rely on protobuf heavily for our grain apis. I did have to tweak the gist slightly... for the ITypeFilter method implementation, it is important to return null if the type isn't an IMessage. Otherwise, I found it preventing some of the built-in serialization from working. I saw errors with it trying to serialize GrainReference, for instance. I'm fine implementing this myself for now, but would love if this was a supported nuget package.

[ReubenBond]

@abe545 do you have an updated version of the gist?

[abe545]

@abe545 do you have an updated version of the gist?

Yep! https://gist.github.com/abe545/d4aa171d6be4c633b0a45bc49e9df0d6