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Protocol Buffers are a method of serializing structured data. As such, they are useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a wire or for storing data. An engineer defines data structures (called messages) and services in a proto definition file (.proto) and compiles that with protoc. This compilation generates code that can be invoked by a sender or recipient of these data structures. For example, example.proto will produce example.pb.cc and example.pb.h which will define C++ classes for each message and service example.proto defines. Protocol Buffers are serialized into a binary wire format which is compact, forwards-compatible, backwards-compatible, but not self-describing.