BaseSerde combines Serde, Serializer, and Deserializer into a single unit and fixes type information for Kotlin. One should not program against this directly, however, it is a convenient basis for writing Kafka Serdes for other types that you might require in your code base.

NativeSerde decorates Kafka Serdes and allows direct access to its Serializer and Deserializer functions.

Proto is a more descriptive type alias for the very generic Message interface from Protobuf. It is also how most people address Protobuf in their conversational language, hence, it aligns the code with that.

The ProtoSerde class is a Kafka Serde/Serializer/Deserializer for Proto, version 2 and 3, objects.