By Chris Kukelwicz, started 2008-07-08

I am uploading this to hackage early, in case someone wished to avoid
duplicating effort.

http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/downloads/list
http://groups.google.com/group/protobuf
http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/proto.html

In particular you need 'descriptor.proto' from the source from Google.
This file describes the programatic representation of a ".proto" file.

to bootstrap:

DONE (1) Decide on how to make the namespaces work
DONE (2) Manually translate 'descriptor.proto' into basic data types under its "DescriptorProtos" namespace
     (3) Write Parsec parser that can load 'descriptor.proto' into basic data types from (2)
     (4) Write automatic translator that can generate haskell source to replace (2) using parsed data from (3)
     (5) Expand (3) to handle full specification for '.proto' files
     (5) Add API (see Java/Python/C++ APIs) to manipulate data/messages/enums/groups/extensions
     (6) Expand (4) to create stub instances for API in (5)
     (7) Implement stub instances for serializing to and from the wire (use Data.Binary ?)
     (8) Implement stub instances for 'rpc' calls

The self-hosting nature of "DescriptorProtos" means that opportunities
for type safety are being lost.  The ranges of the integers and
contents of the strings are not part of the '.proto' file, so the
generated data structures do not reflect bounds or encodings.  The
parser in (3) can be tweaked to use more fine-grained (new)types.