> What you have written is not a serious proposal in terms of a working way to extend Protocol Buffers to allow repeated oneofs.

I didn't intend to propose a solution for protobuf specifically, I explained why the author of the subject article had a point in calling the authors of protobuf amateurs, given the existing spec, that led to specific implementations of the parsers, and the respective downsides.

> But in the real world (yes I'm going to keep saying that, since you don't seem very familiar with it)

I'll have to repeat that "real-world vs the rest of you" talking point is the specific attitude of (ex-)google folks that make them look amateur or, at least, ignorant.

> This isn't as pretty as people might like but it works just fine in practice and we move on to more important things.

That doesn't explain why you didn't implement it differtently, you just stated that you did. So, why didn't you implement it differently, if you admit that a few lines above with: "Yes, I know that. With a clean slate, we can do anything."