-buffers-"></a>Why Use Protocol Buffers?</h2>
<p>Protocol buffers solve the problem of efficiently serializing and deserializing structured data in a language-agnostic manner, accessible a vast array of applications (as long as the applications are written in a language that has a protobuf library). We’ll illustrate this with an example.</p>
<p>The example we’re going to use is a very simple “address book” application that can read and write people’s contact details to and from a file. Each person