[morganherlocker]

Agree. As an example, this proto generates 584 lines of C++, links to 173k lines of dependencies, and generates a 21Kb object file, even before adding grpc:

syntax = "proto3"; message LonLat { float lon = 1; float lat = 2; }

Looking through the generated headers, they are full of autogenerated slop with loads of dependencies, all to read a struct with 2 primitive fields. For a real monorepo, this adds up quickly.

[cyberax]

This is because protobuf supports full run-time reflection and compact serialization (protobuf binary objects are not self-describing), and this requires a bit of infrastructure.

This is a large chunk of code, but it is a one-time tax. The incremental size from this particular message is insignficant.