tokio-rs/prost

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4775 stars · 643 forks observed · 2026-10-01

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

prost is a Protocol Buffers implementation for Rust that generates simple, idiomatic Rust types from proto2 and proto3 files. It supports serialization and deserialization via the bytes crate and includes prost-build for compiling .proto files during Cargo builds.

Use cases

• generate Rust types from .proto files
• serialize and deserialize protobuf messages in Rust
• encode structured data for gRPC services
• add protobuf serialization to existing Rust types with derive attributes
• build a Rust client or server that speaks protobuf

When to choose

• you need protobuf support in Rust with clean, idiomatic generated code
• you want fast binary serialization using the bytes crate
• you are building gRPC services in Rust (e.g., with tonic)
• you want proto comments preserved in generated code

When to avoid

• you need runtime reflection or dynamic message descriptors
• you need protobuf support in a language other than Rust
• you want a batteries-included gRPC framework rather than just protobuf encoding

Facets

library · maturity stable

serialization parser developer-tools apis backend rust cross-platform protobuf code-generation grpc-adjacent proto2 proto3

Member repositories

For agents

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