> if you argue all schema based general purpose binary encoding formats are "pretty much the same"
At the implementation level they are different, but when integrating these protocols into applications, yeah, pretty much. Schema + data goes in, encoded data comes out, or the other way around. In the same way YAML and XML are pretty much the same, just different expressions of the same concepts. ASN.1 even comes with multiple expressions of exactly the same grammar, both in text form and binary form.
ASN.1 was one of the early standardised protocols in this space, though, and suffers from being used mostlyin obscure or legacy protocols, often with proprietary libraries if you go beyond the PKI side of things.
ASN.1 isn't file specific, it was designed for use in telecoms after all, but encodings like DER work better inside of file formats than Protobuf and many protocols like it. Actually having a formal standard makes including it in file types a lot easier.
PB is a lot more invasive at the build system layer, and in the libraries you have to link with. But that's not an essential aspect of PB, more like accidental, thus you're quite right :)
At the implementation level they are different, but when integrating these protocols into applications, yeah, pretty much. Schema + data goes in, encoded data comes out, or the other way around. In the same way YAML and XML are pretty much the same, just different expressions of the same concepts. ASN.1 even comes with multiple expressions of exactly the same grammar, both in text form and binary form.
ASN.1 was one of the early standardised protocols in this space, though, and suffers from being used mostlyin obscure or legacy protocols, often with proprietary libraries if you go beyond the PKI side of things.
ASN.1 isn't file specific, it was designed for use in telecoms after all, but encodings like DER work better inside of file formats than Protobuf and many protocols like it. Actually having a formal standard makes including it in file types a lot easier.