Demonstrate usage of protocol buffers

[alexeagle]

Should have type-safe access to generated protos.

We could use this in our own repo: currently proto objects are type any, eg

rules_typescript/internal/tsc_wrapped/worker.ts

Line 26 in 6456790

const workerpb = (function loadWorkerPb() {

https://github.com/dcodeIO/ProtoBuf.js/#usage-with-typescript seems like the obvious .d.ts code generator to use. This also implies that the library must use the protobuf.js generated runtime.

/cc @jart

[achew22]

Having written a few protoc plugins, you might consider writing your own. It will provide you a lot more control and have relatively few downsides other than taking an afternoon. It also has the fun bootstrapping problem of writing a proto parser that uses its own output to parse the protos. What's more meta than that!

[pshields]

Another option might be the closure_js_proto_library rule from rules_closure. I logged #116 since as far as I can tell it is already generating a Closure-annotated .js output, but I think the output may not be in the place that ts_library expects.

[alexeagle]

As mentioned in the other thread - producing closure-annotated .js isn't useful for ts_library since we don't want to introduce the complexity of converting closure JS signatures to .d.ts files.

[alexeagle]

@mrmeku made a prototype for this at ng-conf which was part of our workshop. I'll clean it up and merge that.

[SirVer]

This is exciting progress!

[alexeagle]

Documentation published at http://tsetse.info/api