1 2011-05-01 version 2.4.1:
4 * Fixed the frendship problem for old compilers to make the library now gcc 3
6 * Fixed vcprojects/extract_includes.bat to extract compiler/plugin.h.
9 * Removed usages of JDK 1.6 only features to make the library now JDK 1.5
11 * Fixed a bug about negative enum values.
12 * serialVersionUID is now defined in generated messages for java serializing.
13 * Fixed protoc to use java.lang.Object, which makes "Object" now a valid
17 * Experimental C++ implementation now requires C++ protobuf library installed.
18 See the README.txt in the python directory for details.
20 2011-02-02 version 2.4.0:
23 * The RPC (cc|java|py)_generic_services default value is now false instead of
25 * Custom options can have aggregate types. For example,
27 optional string comment = 1;
28 optional string author = 2;
30 extend google.protobuf.FieldOptions {
31 optional MyOption myoption = 12345;
33 This option can now be set as follows:
35 optional int32 field = 1 [(myoption) = { comment:'x' author:'y' }];
39 * Various speed and code size optimizations.
40 * Added a release_foo() method on string and message fields.
41 * Fixed gzip_output_stream sub-stream handling.
44 * Builders now maintain sub-builders for sub-messages. Use getFooBuilder() to
45 get the builder for the sub-message "foo". This allows you to repeatedly
46 modify deeply-nested sub-messages without rebuilding them.
47 * Builder.build() no longer invalidates the Builder for generated messages
48 (You may continue to modify it and then build another message).
49 * Code generator will generate efficient equals() and hashCode()
50 implementations if new option java_generate_equals_and_hash is enabled.
51 (Otherwise, reflection-based implementations are used.)
52 * Generated messages now implement Serializable.
53 * Fields with [deprecated=true] will be marked with @Deprecated in Java.
54 * Added lazy conversion of UTF-8 encoded strings to String objects to improve
56 * Various optimizations.
57 * Enum value can be accessed directly, instead of calling getNumber() on the
59 * For each enum value, an integer constant is also generated with the suffix
63 * Added an experimental C++ implementation for Python messages via a Python
64 extension. Implementation type is controlled by an environment variable
65 PROTOCOL_BUFFERS_PYTHON_IMPLEMENTATION (valid values: "cpp" and "python")
66 The default value is currently "python" but will be changed to "cpp" in
68 * Improved performance on message instantiation significantly.
69 Most of the work on message instantiation is done just once per message
70 class, instead of once per message instance.
71 * Improved performance on text message parsing.
72 * Allow add() to forward keyword arguments to the concrete class.
74 item = repeated_field.add()
78 repeated_field.add(foo=bar, baz=quux)
79 * Added a sort() interface to the BaseContainer.
80 * Added an extend() method to repeated composite fields.
81 * Added UTF8 debug string support.
83 2010-01-08 version 2.3.0:
86 * Parsers for repeated numeric fields now always accept both packed and
87 unpacked input. The [packed=true] option only affects serializers.
88 Therefore, it is possible to switch a field to packed format without
89 breaking backwards-compatibility -- as long as all parties are using
90 protobuf 2.3.0 or above, at least.
91 * The generic RPC service code generated by the C++, Java, and Python
92 generators can be disabled via file options:
93 option cc_generic_services = false;
94 option java_generic_services = false;
95 option py_generic_services = false;
96 This allows plugins to generate alternative code, possibly specific to some
97 particular RPC implementation.
100 * Now supports a plugin system for code generators. Plugins can generate
101 code for new languages or inject additional code into the output of other
102 code generators. Plugins are just binaries which accept a protocol buffer
103 on stdin and write a protocol buffer to stdout, so they may be written in
104 any language. See src/google/protobuf/compiler/plugin.proto.
105 **WARNING**: Plugins are experimental. The interface may change in a
107 * If the output location ends in .zip or .jar, protoc will write its output
108 to a zip/jar archive instead of a directory. For example:
109 protoc --java_out=myproto_srcs.jar --python_out=myproto.zip myproto.proto
110 Currently the archive contents are not compressed, though this could change
112 * inf, -inf, and nan can now be used as default values for float and double
116 * Various speed and code size optimizations.
117 * DynamicMessageFactory is now fully thread-safe.
118 * Message::Utf8DebugString() method is like DebugString() but avoids escaping
120 * Compiled-in message types can now contain dynamic extensions, through use
121 of CodedInputStream::SetExtensionRegistry().
122 * Now compiles shared libraries (DLLs) by default on Cygwin and MinGW, to
123 match other platforms. Use --disable-shared to avoid this.
126 * parseDelimitedFrom() and mergeDelimitedFrom() now detect EOF and return
127 false/null instead of throwing an exception.
128 * Fixed some initialization ordering bugs.
129 * Fixes for OpenJDK 7.
132 * 10-25 times faster than 2.2.0, still pure-Python.
133 * Calling a mutating method on a sub-message always instantiates the message
134 in its parent even if the mutating method doesn't actually mutate anything
135 (e.g. parsing from an empty string).
136 * Expanded descriptors a bit.
138 2009-08-11 version 2.2.0:
141 * Lite mode: The "optimize_for = LITE_RUNTIME" option causes the compiler
142 to generate code which only depends libprotobuf-lite, which is much smaller
143 than libprotobuf but lacks descriptors, reflection, and some other features.
144 * Fixed bug where Message.Swap(Message) was only implemented for
145 optimize_for_speed. Swap now properly implemented in both modes
147 * Added RemoveLast and SwapElements(index1, index2) to Reflection
148 interface for repeated elements.
149 * Added Swap(Message) to Reflection interface.
150 * Floating-point literals in generated code that are intended to be
151 single-precision now explicitly have 'f' suffix to avoid pedantic warnings
152 produced by some compilers.
153 * The [deprecated=true] option now causes the C++ code generator to generate
154 a GCC-style deprecation annotation (no-op on other compilers).
155 * google::protobuf::GetEnumDescriptor<SomeGeneratedEnumType>() returns the
156 EnumDescriptor for that type -- useful for templates which cannot call
157 SomeGeneratedEnumType_descriptor().
158 * Various optimizations and obscure bug fixes.
161 * Lite mode: The "optimize_for = LITE_RUNTIME" option causes the compiler
162 to generate code which only depends libprotobuf-lite, which is much smaller
163 than libprotobuf but lacks descriptors, reflection, and some other features.
164 * Lots of style cleanups.
167 * Fixed endianness bug with floats and doubles.
168 * Text format parsing support.
169 * Fix bug with parsing packed repeated fields in embedded messages.
170 * Ability to initialize fields by passing keyword args to constructor.
171 * Support iterators in extend and __setslice__ for containers.
173 2009-05-13 version 2.1.0:
176 * Repeated fields of primitive types (types other that string, group, and
177 nested messages) may now use the option [packed = true] to get a more
178 efficient encoding. In the new encoding, the entire list is written
179 as a single byte blob using the "length-delimited" wire type. Within
180 this blob, the individual values are encoded the same way they would
181 be normally except without a tag before each value (thus, they are
183 * For each field, the generated code contains an integer constant assigned
184 to the field number. For example, the .proto file:
185 message Foo { optional int bar_baz = 123; }
186 would generate the following constants, all with the integer value 123:
187 C++: Foo::kBarBazFieldNumber
188 Java: Foo.BAR_BAZ_FIELD_NUMBER
189 Python: Foo.BAR_BAZ_FIELD_NUMBER
190 Constants are also generated for extensions, with the same naming scheme.
191 These constants may be used as switch cases.
192 * Updated bundled Google Test to version 1.3.0. Google Test is now bundled
193 in its verbatim form as a nested autoconf package, so you can drop in any
194 other version of Google Test if needed.
195 * optimize_for = SPEED is now the default, by popular demand. Use
196 optimize_for = CODE_SIZE if code size is more important in your app.
197 * It is now an error to define a default value for a repeated field.
198 Previously, this was silently ignored (it had no effect on the generated
200 * Fields can now be marked deprecated like:
201 optional int32 foo = 1 [deprecated = true];
202 Currently this does not have any actual effect, but in the future the code
203 generators may generate deprecation annotations in each language.
204 * Cross-compiling should now be possible using the --with-protoc option to
205 configure. See README.txt for more info.
208 * --error_format=msvs option causes errors to be printed in Visual Studio
209 format, which should allow them to be clicked on in the build log to go
210 directly to the error location.
211 * The type name resolver will no longer resolve type names to fields. For
212 example, this now works:
215 optional int32 Foo = 1;
216 optional Foo baz = 2;
218 Previously, the type of "baz" would resolve to "Bar.Foo", and you'd get
219 an error because Bar.Foo is a field, not a type. Now the type of "baz"
220 resolves to the message type Foo. This change is unlikely to make a
221 difference to anyone who follows the Protocol Buffers style guide.
224 * Several optimizations, including but not limited to:
225 - Serialization, especially to flat arrays, is 10%-50% faster, possibly
226 more for small objects.
227 - Several descriptor operations which previously required locking no longer
229 - Descriptors are now constructed lazily on first use, rather than at
230 process startup time. This should save memory in programs which do not
231 use descriptors or reflection.
232 - UnknownFieldSet completely redesigned to be more efficient (especially in
233 terms of memory usage).
234 - Various optimizations to reduce code size (though the serialization speed
235 optimizations increased code size).
236 * Message interface has method ParseFromBoundedZeroCopyStream() which parses
237 a limited number of bytes from an input stream rather than parsing until
239 * GzipInputStream and GzipOutputStream support reading/writing gzip- or
240 zlib-compressed streams if zlib is available.
241 (google/protobuf/io/gzip_stream.h)
242 * DescriptorPool::FindAllExtensions() and corresponding
243 DescriptorDatabase::FindAllExtensions() can be used to enumerate all
244 extensions of a given type.
245 * For each enum type Foo, protoc will generate functions:
246 const string& Foo_Name(Foo value);
247 bool Foo_Parse(const string& name, Foo* result);
248 The former returns the name of the enum constant corresponding to the given
249 value while the latter finds the value corresponding to a name.
250 * RepeatedField and RepeatedPtrField now have back-insertion iterators.
251 * String fields now have setters that take a char* and a size, in addition
252 to the existing ones that took char* or const string&.
253 * DescriptorPool::AllowUnknownDependencies() may be used to tell
254 DescriptorPool to create placeholder descriptors for unknown entities
255 referenced in a FileDescriptorProto. This can allow you to parse a .proto
256 file without having access to other .proto files that it imports, for
258 * Updated gtest to latest version. The gtest package is now included as a
259 nested autoconf package, so it should be able to drop new versions into the
260 "gtest" subdirectory without modification.
263 * Fixed bug where Message.mergeFrom(Message) failed to merge extensions.
264 * Message interface has new method toBuilder() which is equivalent to
265 newBuilderForType().mergeFrom(this).
266 * All enums now implement the ProtocolMessageEnum interface.
267 * Setting a field to null now throws NullPointerException.
268 * Fixed tendency for TextFormat's parsing to overflow the stack when
269 parsing large string values. The underlying problem is with Java's
270 regex implementation (which unfortunately uses recursive backtracking
271 rather than building an NFA). Worked around by making use of possesive
273 * Generated service classes now also generate pure interfaces. For a service
274 Foo, Foo.Interface is a pure interface containing all of the service's
275 defined methods. Foo.newReflectiveService() can be called to wrap an
276 instance of this interface in a class that implements the generic
277 RpcService interface, which provides reflection support that is usually
278 needed by RPC server implementations.
279 * RPC interfaces now support blocking operation in addition to non-blocking.
280 The protocol compiler generates separate blocking and non-blocking stubs
281 which operate against separate blocking and non-blocking RPC interfaces.
282 RPC implementations will have to implement the new interfaces in order to
283 support blocking mode.
284 * New I/O methods parseDelimitedFrom(), mergeDelimitedFrom(), and
285 writeDelimitedTo() read and write "delemited" messages from/to a stream,
286 meaning that the message size precedes the data. This way, you can write
287 multiple messages to a stream without having to worry about delimiting
289 * Throw a more descriptive exception when build() is double-called.
290 * Add a method to query whether CodedInputStream is at the end of the input
292 * Add a method to reset a CodedInputStream's size counter; useful when
293 reading many messages with the same stream.
294 * equals() and hashCode() now account for unknown fields.
297 * Added slicing support for repeated scalar fields. Added slice retrieval and
298 removal of repeated composite fields.
299 * Updated RPC interfaces to allow for blocking operation. A client may
300 now pass None for a callback when making an RPC, in which case the
301 call will block until the response is received, and the response
302 object will be returned directly to the caller. This interface change
303 cannot be used in practice until RPC implementations are updated to
305 * Changes to input_stream.py should make protobuf compatible with appengine.
307 2008-11-25 version 2.0.3:
310 * Enum values may now have custom options, using syntax similar to field
312 * Fixed bug where .proto files which use custom options but don't actually
313 define them (i.e. they import another .proto file defining the options)
314 had to explicitly import descriptor.proto.
315 * Adjacent string literals in .proto files will now be concatenated, like in
317 * If an input file is a Windows absolute path (e.g. "C:\foo\bar.proto") and
318 the import path only contains "." (or contains "." but does not contain
319 the file), protoc incorrectly thought that the file was under ".", because
320 it thought that the path was relative (since it didn't start with a slash).
324 * Generated message classes now have a Swap() method which efficiently swaps
325 the contents of two objects.
326 * All message classes now have a SpaceUsed() method which returns an estimate
327 of the number of bytes of allocated memory currently owned by the object.
328 This is particularly useful when you are reusing a single message object
329 to improve performance but want to make sure it doesn't bloat up too large.
330 * New method Message::SerializeAsString() returns a string containing the
331 serialized data. May be more convenient than calling
332 SerializeToString(string*).
333 * In debug mode, log error messages when string-type fields are found to
334 contain bytes that are not valid UTF-8.
335 * Fixed bug where a message with multiple extension ranges couldn't parse
337 * Fixed bug where MergeFrom(const Message&) didn't do anything if invoked on
338 a message that contained no fields (but possibly contained extensions).
339 * Fixed ShortDebugString() to not be O(n^2). Durr.
340 * Fixed crash in TextFormat parsing if the first token in the input caused a
342 * Fixed obscure bugs in zero_copy_stream_impl.cc.
343 * Added support for HP C++ on Tru64.
344 * Only build tests on "make check", not "make".
345 * Fixed alignment issue that caused crashes when using DynamicMessage on
346 64-bit Sparc machines.
347 * Simplify template usage to work with MSVC 2003.
348 * Work around GCC 4.3.x x86_64 compiler bug that caused crashes on startup.
349 (This affected Fedora 9 in particular.)
350 * Now works on "Solaris 10 using recent Sun Studio".
353 * New overload of mergeFrom() which parses a slice of a byte array instead
355 * New method ByteString.asReadOnlyByteBuffer() does what it sounds like.
356 * Improved performance of isInitialized() when optimizing for code size.
359 * Corrected ListFields() signature in Message base class to match what
360 subclasses actually implement.
361 * Some minor refactoring.
362 * Don't pass self as first argument to superclass constructor (no longer
363 allowed in Python 2.6).
365 2008-09-29 version 2.0.2:
368 * License changed from Apache 2.0 to New BSD.
369 * It is now possible to define custom "options", which are basically
370 annotations which may be placed on definitions in a .proto file.
371 For example, you might define a field option called "foo" like so:
372 import "google/protobuf/descriptor.proto"
373 extend google.protobuf.FieldOptions {
374 optional string foo = 12345;
376 Then you annotate a field using the "foo" option:
378 optional int32 some_field = 1 [(foo) = "bar"]
380 The value of this option is then visible via the message's
382 const FieldDescriptor* field =
383 MyMessage::descriptor()->FindFieldByName("some_field");
384 assert(field->options().GetExtension(foo) == "bar");
385 This feature has been implemented and tested in C++ and Java.
386 Other languages may or may not need to do extra work to support
387 custom options, depending on how they construct descriptors.
390 * Fixed some GCC warnings that only occur when using -pedantic.
391 * Improved static initialization code, making ordering more
392 predictable among other things.
393 * TextFormat will no longer accept messages which contain multiple
394 instances of a singular field. Previously, the latter instance
395 would overwrite the former.
396 * Now works on systems that don't have hash_map.
399 * Print @Override annotation in generated code where appropriate.
402 * Strings now use the "unicode" type rather than the "str" type.
403 String fields may still be assigned ASCII "str" values; they will
404 automatically be converted.
405 * Adding a property to an object representing a repeated field now
406 raises an exception. For example:
407 # No longer works (and never should have).
408 message.some_repeated_field.foo = 1
411 * We now build static libraries rather than DLLs by default on MSVC.
412 See vsprojects/readme.txt for more information.
414 2008-08-15 version 2.0.1:
417 * New flags --encode and --decode can be used to convert between protobuf text
418 format and binary format from the command-line.
419 * New flag --descriptor_set_out can be used to write FileDescriptorProtos for
420 all parsed files directly into a single output file. This is particularly
421 useful if you wish to parse .proto files from programs written in languages
422 other than C++: just run protoc as a background process and have it output
423 a FileDescriptorList, then parse that natively.
424 * Improved error message when an enum value's name conflicts with another
425 symbol defined in the enum type's scope, e.g. if two enum types declared
426 in the same scope have values with the same name. This is disallowed for
427 compatibility with C++, but this wasn't clear from the error.
428 * Fixed absolute output paths on Windows.
429 * Allow trailing slashes in --proto_path mappings.
432 * Reflection objects are now per-class rather than per-instance. To make this
433 possible, the Reflection interface had to be changed such that all methods
434 take the Message instance as a parameter. This change improves performance
435 significantly in memory-bandwidth-limited use cases, since it makes the
436 message objects smaller. Note that source-incompatible interface changes
437 like this will not be made again after the library leaves beta.
438 * Heuristically detect sub-messages when printing unknown fields.
439 * Fix static initialization ordering bug that caused crashes at startup when
440 compiling on Mac with static linking.
441 * Fixed TokenizerTest when compiling with -DNDEBUG on Linux.
442 * Fixed incorrect definition of kint32min.
443 * Fix bytes type setter to work with byte sequences with embedded NULLs.
444 * Other irrelevant tweaks.
447 * Fixed UnknownFieldSet's parsing of varints larger than 32 bits.
448 * Fixed TextFormat's parsing of "inf" and "nan".
449 * Fixed TextFormat's parsing of comments.
450 * Added info to Java POM that will be required when we upload the
451 package to a Maven repo.
454 * MergeFrom(message) and CopyFrom(message) are now implemented.
455 * SerializeToString() raises an exception if the message is missing required
457 * Code organization improvements.
458 * Fixed doc comments for RpcController and RpcChannel, which had somehow been
460 * Fixed text_format_test on Windows where floating-point exponents sometimes
462 * Fix Python service CallMethod() implementation.
466 * VIM syntax highlighting improvements.
468 2008-07-07 version 2.0.0:
470 * First public release.