Hi guys, I wanted to ask what is the current stat...

# kotlin-native

[Vlad Balan]

Hi guys,

I wanted to ask what is the current status for using protobuf with Kotlin/Native ?
If anybody, can provide some useful links for this, I would be thankful.

[Kris Wong]

protobuf is written in C++, not C

[Vlad Balan]

So it is not possible?

[Kris Wong]

you will have to write a shim in C, but it is technically possible

[Vlad Balan]

protobuf compiler can generate objective-c code and Kotlin/Native can interop with objective-c . Could this also work?

[Kris Wong]

sure, but you still need APIs from the protobuf library, right?

[Vlad Balan]

At the moment I just want to access some objects defined in protobuf from native

[Dominaezzz]

What do you mean by "using"? What exactly are you trying to achieve?

[Vlad Balan]

I have .proto files and based on them C++ is generated and then used in a C++ project. I want to somehow be able to generate some code that should somehow be used in Kotlin/Native .

[Dominaezzz]

Oh I see. There should be a plugin for that, iirc.

[Vlad Balan]

Are you refering to this:
• https://github.com/rouzwawi/grpc-kotlin
Is this also for Kotlin/Native?

[Kweku]

You can use this to generate Kotlin code from Protobufs https://github.com/streem/pbandk . When you follow the instructions take note of this issue https://github.com/streem/pbandk/issues/18 . If you want go use a gradle task to generate code rather than terminal take note of this example https://github.com/streem/pbandk/blob/master/examples/gradle-and-jvm but I had to change line 36 to get it working. When you run installDist on the Protoc-gen-kotlin source files the instructions tell you to download, it should generate a Protoc-gen-kotlin.bat file, change line 36 to point to that file, was the only way I got it working

[Kweku]

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization this also supports serializing and deserializing protobufs

[Vlad Balan]

🙏Thanks! I will try it out!