RProtoBuf: R Interface to Google Protocol Buffers

What are Protocol Buffers?

A serialization format developed by Google and used widely within Google, and by numerous other projects. Quoting from the official website:

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral,

extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages.

Protocol Buffers natively support C++, C#, Go, Java and Python. Many other languages are supported via contributed extensions. This package adds support for R.

Installation

You can either install from source via this repo, or install the CRAN package the usual way from R via

install.packages("RProtoBuf")

but do make sure you have the system requirements covered when building from source.

Under Debian/Ubuntu you may need

sudo apt-get install protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev libprotoc-dev 

with similar commands on other operating systems or distributions.

Documentation

The package contains two pdf vignettes; the second one corresponds to our JSS paper.

Authors

Romain Francois, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Murray Stokely and Jeroen Ooms

License

GPL (>= 2)