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v0

The original rules_proto was https://github.com/pubref/rules_proto. This was redesigned around the proto_library rule and moved to https://github.com/stackb/rules_proto.

v1

These were pretty good, but open source maintainance was an issue trying to keep up with the matrix of (language * dependencies).

Partially as a result of that, this ruleset was forked to https://github.com/rules-proto-grpc/rules_proto_grpc. Aspect-based compilation was featured for quite a while there but later removed. Adam does a great job maintaining that repo. If you're not using gazelle, check it out!

v2

stackb/rules_proto adopted gazelle as a primary means to manage proto rules. This shifted the burden of dependency management primarily to the consuming repos where it belongs.

The gazelle based design makes some things simpler because the content of the proto files is the source of truth. Due to the fact that Bazel does not permit reading/interpreting a file during the scope of an action, it is impossible to make a decision about what to do. A prime example of this is the go_package option. If the go_package option is present, the location of the output file for protoc-gen-go is completely different. As a result, the information about the go_package metadata ultimately needs to be duplicated so that the build system can know about it.

The gazelle-based approach moves all that messy interpretation and evaluation into a precompiled state; as a result, the work that needs to be done in the action itself is simplified.

Furthermore, by parsing the proto files it is easy to support complex custom plugins that do things like:

  • Emit no files (only assert/lint).
  • Emit a file only if a specific enum constant is found. With the previous design, this was near impossible. With the v2 design, the protoc.Plugin implementation can trivially perform that evaluation because it is handed the complete proto AST during gazelle evaluation.

v3

The way gazelle stored resolve data in memory changed in 0.35. Uprading to this in https://github.com/stackb/rules_proto/v4/pull/357 was a breaking change.

v4

With v4, WORKSPACE support was dropped in favor of bzlmod.