This is a tool for consuming Protocol Buffer DSL files and extracting Messages and Enums out, converting them into TypeScript native code.

This is somewhat similar to the official protoc binary, in that it can be used to generate code from the DSL, but this tool is very different in that it is fully written in TypeScript, and is designed to only output TypeScript.

To install:

# Needs `--allow-read` to be able to read .proto files
# Needs `--allow-write` to be able to write pb.ts files
deno install --allow-read --allow-write https://deno.land/x/protod/protod.ts

protod gen my.proto

You can compare the example .proto and .pb.ts files in the ./testdata/ directory. They are designed to look like files a human might actually write; readability is important for debugability!

That would have potentially been much easier than writing an entire Protocol Buffers DSL parser from scratch, but there are several reasons why this tool was created:

• The protoc binary is seriously unwieldy to use.
• The Protocol Buffer "standard" is a single C library which is a manually written tokenizer/parser, and could really do with some alternative implementations.
• Being fully written in TypeScript (the parser and generator) makes it easier for developers to get involved in the tooling.
• The plan for this tool is to grow into linting, formatting, and doc generation, in the spirit of Deno/Go.

Having said that, this tool - not being officially supported - should be considered caveat emptor. There are likely bugs or inconsistencies between this and official implementations. If you find one, please send a PR with a failing test!

Well, aside from answering some of that in the above question, there are also some problems with the official JS plugin. Chiefly:

• It's written JS first, and while it does have TypeScript definitions, which means for example Enums are not TypeScript first class Enums.
• The output is also relatively difficult to read - given it uses non-standard JS features such as the Google Closure Compiler module system.
• The API the generated code features is a little unwieldy too. Method names like setName(), setAge() are used rather than simple field properties.