protos-ts

This a CLI tool for transforming of .proto files into typescript modules. It is faster alternative to protobufjs package.

Install

# global install
npm install --global protos-ts

# local install
npm install -D protos-ts

Rationale

protobufjs is currently used as a main javascript(and typesript) compiler. But there are several problems with this tool.

It produces single large javascript file. It does not have typings by default. Types are introduced as external index.d.ts file.

What are the results of it? It is not easily tree-shakable.

Usually the case is that some messages in your project are "encode"-only and some of the are "decode" only. But since they are highly coupled - you must load both encoding and decoding functions. This tool for each message creates separated folder with all necessary function placed in it's own place.

Also protobufjs uses JS to read, parse and compile .proto schemas to javascript. This tool is written in Rust. So as a result it is faster than [protobufjs] alternative.

How to use

Example:

# if installed locally
protos-ts ./proto --out ./typescript-schemas

# via npx
npx protos-ts ./proto --out ./typescript-schemas

As you can see it has such structure:

protos-ts <input folder full of .proto files> --out <output folder>

input folder full of .proto files is a folder that contains all of your .proto files.

Example:

proto
 | Action.proto
 | Commons
    | Enums.proto
    | Types.proto

output folder is the folder where you want your typescript files to appear.

Result

out
  | Action
    | MyMessage
      | decode.ts
      | encode.ts
  | Commons
    | Enums
      | MyEnum.ts
    | types.ts

These typescript files use protobufjs/minimal to decode and encode protocol buffers types. So in order to use them after compilation you need protobufjs to be installed.

Performance

I didn't do it properly. But on my computer I've compared this implementation with official compiler; I've took protocol buffer files from my work project and compiled both of them several times and took minimum.

This compiler: 0.9s
official: 7s

Actually it is difficult to compare them because they do a different job.

Official protobuf.js compiler generates big large file. While this compiler produces hierarchy of different files. Therefore we have much more IO operations.

I've found that in my compiler 92% of the time is spent in IO operations to the harddrive.

collect file names 5.328ms
parsing files 44.7105ms
compiling files to typescript 33.6335ms
saving typescript files 1.0607062s
Full Time 1.1485477s