Exercise: Protobuf Parsing
In this exercise, you will build a parser for the protobuf binary encoding. Don’t worry, it’s simpler than it seems! This illustrates a common parsing pattern, passing slices of data. The underlying data itself is never copied.
Fully parsing a protobuf message requires knowing the types of the fields, indexed by their field numbers. That is typically provided in a proto file. In this exercise, we’ll encode that information into match statements in functions that get called for each field.
We’ll use the following proto:
message PhoneNumber {
optional string number = 1;
optional string type = 2;
}
message Person {
optional string name = 1;
optional int32 id = 2;
repeated PhoneNumber phones = 3;
}
A proto message is encoded as a series of fields, one after the next. Each is implemented as a “tag” followed by the value. The tag contains a field number (e.g., 2 for the id field of a Person message) and a wire type defining how the payload should be determined from the byte stream.
Integers, including the tag, are represented with a variable-length encoding called VARINT. Luckily, parse_varint is defined for you below. The given code also defines callbacks to handle Person and PhoneNumber fields, and to parse a message into a series of calls to those callbacks.
What remains for you is to implement the parse_field function and the ProtoMessage trait for Person and PhoneNumber.