Overview
This is protobuf-c, a C implementation of Google Protocol Buffers. It includes libprotobuf-c, a pure C library that implements protobuf encoding and decoding, and protoc-c, a code generator that converts Protocol Buffer .proto files to C descriptor code, based on the original protoc. protobuf-c formerly included an RPC implementation; that code has been split out into the protobuf-c-rpc project.
protobuf-c was originally maintained by Dave Benson through version 0.15 but is now being maintained by a new team. Thanks, Dave!
Building
protobuf-c requires a C compiler, a C++ compiler, Google Protocol Buffers, and pkg-config to be installed.
./configure && make && make install
If building from a git checkout, the autotools (autoconf, automake, libtool) must also be installed, and the build system must be generated by running the autogen.sh script.
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && make install
Synopsis
Include the protobuf-c header file:
#include <protobuf-c/protobuf-c.h>
Link against the protobuf-c library.
-lprotobuf-c
libprotobuf-c includes a pkg-config file. It is recommended to use the pkg-config system in order to determine the complete set of compiler and linker flags for building applications that utilize libprotobuf-c. If using pkg-config with autoconf, the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro can be used to detect the presence of libprotobuf-c:
PKG_CHECK_MODULES([PROTOBUF_C], [libprotobuf-c])
This will place compiler flags in the PROTOBUF_C_CFLAGS variable and linker flags in the PROTOBUF_C_LDFLAGS variable.
Note that the protobuf-c header file was installed as google/protobuf-c/protobuf-c.h in previous versions. A compatibility symlink has been left in place to avoid breaking existing code.
Versioning
protobuf-c follows the Semantic Versioning Specification.
Contributing
Please send patches to the protobuf-c mailing list or by opening a GitHub pull request.
Copyright to all contributions are retained by the original author, but must be licensed under the terms of the BSD-2-Clause license. Please add a Signed-off-by header to your commit message (git commit -s) to indicate that you are licensing your contribution under these terms.