What is the status of proto support in Rust?

Hi,

Bit of a question / observation - working with protos recently in Rust and it seems like the main library used for building .rs files from .protos is Prost; however according to the docs it is no longer actively maintained.

https://github.com/tokio-rs/prost

the maintainer says that Google will have their own superior library soon - and then you follow the link to it and it looks like it is some form of more painful library they have created that requires installing a load of C++ stuff plus maybe doesn't generate actual .rs source files at the end.

https://crates.io/crates/protobuf/4.33.1-release

and... noone seems to use it. maybe the downloads are 0.01% as many as Prost.

I am not totally familiar with what is going on and probably have misunderstood the technical side but can anyone explain what is happening in this space if they know more?

Edit - correction it's been pointed out that the Google crate is more like 1/3 that of Prost, I missed the filter...!