Question

I want to compare two arbitrary google::protobuf::Message objects.

I assume that objects are equal when

• their descriptions contain fields with equal field numbers and corresponding field types.
• their reflections have same set of fields (and the same number of repeated fields) and equal corresponding field values.

I know, that I can write such comparison function by myself, but may be there is already some simple or predefined solution?

Also, may be I’m missing some principal issue about incomparability of such objects – I would like to know if it’s so.

Answer 1

From https://groups.google.com/d/msg/protobuf/5sOExQkB2eQ/ZSBNZI0K54YJ:

In C++, you could serialize the two and compare the bytes.
Alternatively, you could write some code that iterates over the fields
via reflection and compares them.