swift-protobuf

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# Swift Protobuf

**Welcome to Swift Protobuf!**

[Apple's Swift programming language](https://swift.org/) is a perfect
complement to [Google's Protocol Buffer](https://protobuf.dev/)
("protobuf") serialization technology.
They both emphasize high performance and programmer safety.

This project provides both the command-line program that adds Swift
code generation to Google's `protoc` and the runtime library that is
necessary for using the generated code.
After using the protoc plugin to generate Swift code from your .proto
files, you will need to add this library to your project.

[![Build and Test](https://github.com/apple/swift-protobuf/actions/workflows/build.yml/badge.svg?branch=main)](https://github.com/apple/swift-protobuf/actions/workflows/build.yml)
[![Check Upstream Protos](https://github.com/apple/swift-protobuf/actions/workflows/check_upstream_protos.yml/badge.svg?branch=main)](https://github.com/apple/swift-protobuf/actions/workflows/check_upstream_protos.yml)
[![Run Protobuf Head Conformance Tests](https://github.com/apple/swift-protobuf/actions/workflows/head_conformance.yml/badge.svg?branch=main)](https://github.com/apple/swift-protobuf/actions/workflows/head_conformance.yml)

# Features of SwiftProtobuf

SwiftProtobuf offers many advantages over alternative serialization
systems:

* Safety: The protobuf code-generation system avoids the
  errors that are common with hand-built serialization code.
* Correctness: SwiftProtobuf passes both its own extensive
  test suite and Google's full conformance test for protobuf
  correctness.
* Schema-driven: Defining your data structures in a separate
  `.proto` schema file clearly documents your communications
  conventions.
* Idiomatic: SwiftProtobuf takes full advantage of the Swift language.
  In particular, all generated types provide full Swift copy-on-write
  value semantics.
* Efficient binary serialization: The `.serializedBytes()`
  method returns a bag of bytes with a compact binary form of your data.
  You can deserialize the data using the `init(contiguousBytes:)`
  initializer.
* Standard JSON serialization: The `.jsonUTF8Bytes()` method returns a JSON
  form of your data that can be parsed with the `init(jsonUTF8Bytes:)`
  initializer.
* Hashable, Equatable: The generated struct can be put into a
  `Set<>` or `Dictionary<>`.
* Performant: The binary and JSON serializers have been
  extensively optimized.
* Extensible: You can add your own Swift extensions to any
  of the generated types.

Best of all, you can take the same `.proto` file and generate
Java, C++, Python, or Objective-C for use on other platforms. The
generated code for those languages will use the exact same
serialization and deserialization conventions as SwiftProtobuf, making
it easy to exchange serialized data in binary or JSON forms, with no
additional effort on your part.

# Documentation

More information is available in th