Yup. I don't remember streaming JSON being common in the early days but now it is. But the absence of streaming protobuf is what has killed me, when dealing with gigantic protobuf files from government agencies (ugh).
Heh, yeah. The protobuf people's expectation was if you had a really large dataset you'd wrap it up in your own mini-protocol of "sequence of protobuf messages". But of course that's way more friction, so in practice it will end up not getting done when it should be (plus also, it requires a certain amount of ability to predict the future).
Lesson for technologists: if you want to make the world a better place arrange your tech such that the lowest-friction path is also the correct path.
(Another example: disasterous multi-byte UTF encodings [correct solution was more friction] vs basically successful UTF8 [correct solution was less friction].)
I don't know if you're still dealing w/ this particular problem for protobufs, but based on my experience with thrift, a very similar library, there are probably some not too terrible ways you can kinda hack up the client-side parsing to be more streaming-ish...
nanopb is designed around streaming. It's limited in a few ways[1] but is designed for use on low-memory systems (microcontrollers) where the whole protobuf message won't necessarily fit into memory at once. Might not help for your use cases though, since it's a C library without a stable ABI.
