What about the other flags?

Obviously, after taking a look at the output of protoc --help, you cannot help but wonder what all these other flags are doing. For the sake of brevity, I do not cover them all here, but I thought it would be nice to mention some other flags and let you play with them. Consider this as a mini-challenge.

The first one that I particularly like is --descriptor_set_out. Now, we did not talk about Descriptor types yet. We will see them in more detail later in the book when we will manipulate them, but for now, all you need to know is that they are messages that represent Protobuf schema constructs. What this means is that we can encode the schema itself into binary.

For this mini-challenge, you will need to write a .proto file and encode it to binary with --descriptor_set_out. Once this is done, you will need to use --decode to inspect the content. Note that you have access to the .proto file where FileDescriptorSet (the type it serializes to) is defined...