[billsmithaustin]

It's wrong to assume that just because gRPC shares some design features with CORBA that it shares every CORBA feature or every CORBA shortcoming.

There have been technologies to generate stubs, skeletons, and protocols from specification files for at least 30 years. Some of the older designs sprung out of a client/server world, whereas newer designs deal with today's reality, e.g. interoperability with today's web and the need for horizontal scalability.

What hasn't changed is that it's still useful to describe a communication protocol in a declarative way and then rely on a code generator to provide the code to work with that protocol.

Google protocol buffers offer advantages beyond that, but you may need to look beyond any preconceived CORBA biases to appreciate them.