README.md
1Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format
2===================================================
3
4[](https://travis-ci.org/google/protobuf)
5
6Copyright 2008 Google Inc.
7
8This directory contains conformance tests for testing completeness and
9correctness of Protocol Buffers implementations. These tests are designed
10to be easy to run against any Protocol Buffers implementation.
11
12This directory contains the tester process `conformance-test`, which
13contains all of the tests themselves. Then separate programs written
14in whatever language you want to test communicate with the tester
15program over a pipe.
16
17Before running any of these tests, make sure you run `make` in the base
18directory to build `protoc`, since all the tests depend on it.
19
20 $ make
21
22Then to run the tests against the C++ implementation, run:
23
24 $ cd conformance && make test_cpp
25
26More tests and languages will be added soon!
27
28Testing other Protocol Buffer implementations
29---------------------------------------------
30
31To run these tests against a new Protocol Buffers implementation, write a
32program in your language that uses the protobuf implementation you want
33to test. This program should implement the testing protocol defined in
34[conformance.proto](https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/conformance/conformance.proto).
35This is designed to be as easy as possible: the C++ version is only
36150 lines and is a good example for what this program should look like
37(see [conformance_cpp.cc](https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/conformance/conformance_cpp.cc)).
38The program only needs to be able to read from stdin and write to stdout.
39
40Portability
41-----------
42
43Note that the test runner currently does not work on Windows. Patches
44to fix this are welcome! (But please get in touch first to settle on
45a general implementation strategy).
46
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