Encoding: Longs default value of 0 is not being set on the wire

[robin-anil]

protobuf.js version: master

Is this intended? If the field is set java proto2 library does not ignore defaults and sets it on the byte stream

[robin-anil]

In general anything set (either on the object or present in the json from which it is parsed) should be on the wire.

[dcodeIO]

I always assumed that such default values would ideally be excluded on the wire for efficiency, at least that's what I'd expect. Do you know if this is an official implementation detail or if it just happens that the Java lib does it this way?

[robin-anil]

I guess it is official implementation detail based on both C++ and Java libraries (~8 years of exp now). I don't know about the other languages.

[robin-anil]

With proto3 I presume you can make the argument that default values should be excluded. But I have definitely been used to the behavior of value being set in the proto2 world.

[robin-anil]

Could you help get a release out with a fix for this issue. This is the last remaining issue with migrating our code-base.

[dcodeIO]

Sorry, have been busy fixing jsPerf today. On top of that, a fix for this would break a lot of stuff, as the entire default values on prototypes model is involved. Just using hasOwnProperty to solve this would yield terrible performance afaik (need to revalidate that).

see - but this could be broken if defined checks are optimized away.

[dcodeIO]

I've now tested an implementation that uses Object.keys to determine which values are present. Unfortunately, that's 33% slower than what we have now (bench drops from 513k to 342k ops/s).

[dcodeIO]

Now testing an implementation using hasOwnProperty. This does in fact seem to drop by just a bit with all the default value checks removed. Investigating.

[dcodeIO]

As a side-product, generated toObject implementations are super fast now using hasOwnPropery instead of Object.keys.

[robin-anil]

Works great! Now I need a new release and I push our new converted code base to QA!

[dcodeIO]

Released on npm. Feel free to reopen if there are any issues!

[robin-anil]

@dcodeIO I am seeing more related issues. nulled/undefined string fields are being sent as empty strings. across the wire

Version: 6.5.0

[dcodeIO]

Reference: https://github.com/dcodeIO/protobuf.js/blob/master/src/encoder.js#L88

Might be the case for required fields, yeah. Should throw on .verify though. Can you provide an example?

[robin-anil]

These are not required fields, lets continue conversation here #652