[rigelbm]

Actually, I thought about it twice and I retract what I said about this specification being pointless for building tools compatible with protobuf. Reasons:

* The language itself is unlikely to change much given it's been public for so long. A non-official spec that captures the current implementation is probably going to survive for some time.

* There's no official spec (which I would prefer) for me to base my tool on. This spec is about my only choice. The more tools targeting this spec, the hardest would be for Google to break compatibility with it, reinforcing my previous point.

I will keep the parent comment for context, and I don't retract the fact that I think the title is misleading. Otherwise, great work!!

[staticassertion]

Agreed. If IDEs and alternative compilers are all building off of the spec because it's the path of least resistance, and there are no bugs for a while, the defacto standard impl is going to face serious scrutiny for parting from it.

And, as you said, proto isn't in a great position to be making crazy changes anyway.