title: Serializing Dates with Protocol Buffers
body: <p>So after some searching, its been suggested to use an <code>int64</code> epoch.</p>
  
  <p>This is all well and great, but when interacting with my model, I would like to interact with actual <code>LocalDate</code> objects, so what are strategies for handling this?</p>
  
  <p>The two strategies I can think of are:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>transform the deserialized model into ANOTHER different model. This is creating an extra object, I was hoping to avoid this.</li>
  <li>edit the generated models. I can't find any documentation on this so its probably quite risky</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>What is the common practice here?</p>