Encoding

This document describes the protocol buffer wire format, which defines the details of how your message is sent on the wire and how much space it consumes on disk. You probably don’t need to understand this to use protocol buffers in your application, but it’s useful information for doing optimizations. If you already know the concepts but want a reference, skip to the Condensed reference card section. Protoscope is a very simple language for describing snippets of the low-level wire format, which we’ll use to provide a visual reference for the encoding of various messages.