Protocol Buffers (protobuf) for Python

Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral mechanism for serializing structured data. You define message schemas in .proto files, compile them with protoc into _pb2.py modules, and use the runtime library (google.protobuf.*) to serialize, deserialize, and manipulate messages. Currently at version 7.34.1 (Python major version bumped from 6.x to 7.x in the 7.34.0 release). Releases follow a quarterly cadence; breaking major-version bumps are targeted at Q1 of each year.