I imagine that one of the points of a solid protocol buffers library would be to align the types even across programming languages. E.g. explicitly force a 64-bit integer rather than "int" relying on the platform. And to have some custom "string" type which is always UTF-8 encoded in memory rather than depending on the platform-specific encoding.
(I have no idea if that is the case with protobuf, I don't have enough experience with it.)
(I have no idea if that is the case with protobuf, I don't have enough experience with it.)