This repo makes it easy to work in the protobuf tool chain using Go.

First and foremost, the included plugins package makes it easy to implement protoc plugins in Go. It defines an interface that plugins implement as well as facilities to actually integrate with protoc (e.g. implementing the proper plugin protocol). It also provides "name resolution" logic: computing qualified names in Go source code for elements in proto descriptors. This makes it a snap to write plugins in Go that generate additional Go code from your proto sources.

This repo also contains a pure-Go re-implementation of protoc. This new version of protoc, named goprotoc (of course!), will delegate to a protoc executable on the path, driving it as if it were a plugin, for generating C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Ruby code (since they are implemented in protoc itself). But it provides descriptors to protoc, parsed by goprotoc, instead of having protoc re-parse all of the source code. And it can invoke any other plugins (such as protoc-gen-go) the same way that protoc would.

In addition to the goprotoc command, this repo provides a package that other Go programs can use as the entry-point to running Protocol Buffer code gen, without having to shell out to an external program.

You'll also find a protoc plugin named protoc-gen-gox that can be the entry point for generating Go code. It will delegate to protoc-gen-go for standard code gen and gRPC code gen, but it can also be configured to execute other plugins that emit additional Go code. It's sort of like a plugin multiplexer that supports a configuration file for enabling and configuring the various plugins that it invokes.