compiling proto files at runtime

I'm开发者_Go百科 working a generic protobuf decoder that works as follows:

The user can specify the .proto file at runtime and specify the data file and the program would display the data in the file based on the .proto definition.

To do the above, the most obvious things seems like I would need to interpret the .proto file (or compile it) and then decode the protobuf message using it. Any ideas on how I can proceed on this? Is there a library out there that would help me with this.

As always, any feedback is much appreciated.

Thanks!

I keep meaning to write my own parser, but for now I just use "protoc" to parse the .proto to a protobuf binary. I then deserialize that using my own protobuf library, giving me a populated object model to work with.

I don't know how far along you are, but you might also be interested in some of the runtime support in protobuf-net v2, which allows on-the-fly mapping of protobuf data to types. Alternatively there's also a fairly re-usable reader implementation that might suit your needs.

If you could work from XML, I include a tool in protobuf-net, "protogen", which does code-gen; but pass in a -t:xml and it should transform a .proto into XML for you.

Iirc, "protoc" outputs a protobuf using "descriptor.proto" from the google package.