First pass of the readme. Lots more to come.

pull/288/head
Jon Skeet 17 years ago
parent ec8c395517
commit 007f859664
  1. 38
      CSHARP-README.txt

@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
Readme for the C#/.NET implementation of Protocol Buffers
Copyright 2008 Google Inc.
http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/
and
http://github.com/jskeet/dotnet-protobufs
(This will eventually be written up into a full tutorial etc.)
Differences with respect to the Java API
----------------------------------------
Many of the changes are obvious "making it more like .NET", but
others are more subtle.
o Properties and indexers are used reasonably extensively.
o newFoo becomes CreateFoo everywhere.
o Classes are broken up much more - for instance, there are
namespaces for descriptors and field accessors, just to make it
easier to see what's going on.
o There's a mixture of generic and non-generic code. This
is interesting (at least if you're a language nerd). Java's generics
are somewhat different to those of .NET, partly due to type erasure
but in other ways too. .NET allows types to be overloaded by the
number of generic parameters, but there's no such thing as the
"raw" type of a generic type. Combining these two facts, I've
ended up with two interfaces for messages, and two for builders -
in each case, a non-generic one and a generic one which derives
from the generic one. Where the members clash (e.g. IBuilder.Build
and IBuilder<TMessage>.Build vary only by return type) the
implementations use explicit interface implementation to provide
the most useful method in most cases. This is very much like
the normal implementation of IEnumerable<T> which extends
IEnumerable. As an aside, this becomes a pain when trying to
create "the read-only version of this list, whose type I don't
know but I know it's a List<something>". Oh for mumble types.
Loading…
Cancel
Save