1Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format 2=================================================== 3 4[](https://travis-ci.org/google/protobuf) [](https://ci.appveyor.com/project/protobuf/protobuf) 5 6Copyright 2008 Google Inc. 7 8https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/ 9 10Overview 11-------- 12 13Protocol Buffers (a.k.a., protobuf) are Google's language-neutral, 14platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. You 15can find [protobuf's documentation on the Google Developers site](https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/). 16 17This README file contains protobuf installation instructions. To install 18protobuf, you need to install the protocol compiler (used to compile .proto 19files) and the protobuf runtime for your chosen programming language. 20 21Protocol Compiler Installation 22------------------------------ 23 24The protocol compiler is written in C++. If you are using C++, please follow 25the [C++ Installation Instructions](src/README.md) to install protoc along 26with the C++ runtime. 27 28For non-C++ users, the simplest way to install the protocol compiler is to 29download a pre-built binary from our release page: 30 31 [https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases](https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases) 32 33In the downloads section of each release, you can find pre-built binaries in 34zip packages: protoc-$VERSION-$PLATFORM.zip. It contains the protoc binary 35as well as a set of standard .proto files distributed along with protobuf. 36 37If you are looking for an old version that is not available in the release 38page, check out the maven repo here: 39 40 [http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/google/protobuf/protoc/](http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/google/protobuf/protoc/) 41 42These pre-built binaries are only provided for released versions. If you want 43to use the github master version at HEAD, or you need to modify protobuf code, 44or you are using C++, it's recommended to build your own protoc binary from 45source. 46 47If you would like to build protoc binary from source, see the [C++ Installation 48Instructions](src/README.md). 49 50Protobuf Runtime Installation 51----------------------------- 52 53Protobuf supports several different programming languages. For each programming 54language, you can find instructions in the corresponding source directory about 55how to install protobuf runtime for that specific language: 56 57| Language | Source | 58|--------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------| 59| C++ (include C++ runtime and protoc) | [src](src) | 60| Java | [java](java) | 61| Python | [python](python) | 62| Objective-C | [objectivec](objectivec) | 63| C# | [csharp](csharp) | 64| JavaNano | [javanano](javanano) | 65| JavaScript | [js](js) | 66| Ruby | [ruby](ruby) | 67| Go | [golang/protobuf](https://github.com/golang/protobuf) | 68| PHP | TBD | 69 70 71Usage 72----- 73 74The complete documentation for Protocol Buffers is available via the 75web at: 76 77 https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/ 78
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