[weitzj]

Exactly what I am thinking. My use case is to have a shared api repository containing an IDL (here protobuf/grpc) and you hook it up as submodules for iOS, android, Golang. The round trip time is reduced compared to creating and publishing modules for each generated code. This makes it far easier to experiment with a new api feature so one gets a better feeling how this behaves in each language. And if the api is mature enough you might as well change your development flow into publishing modules instead of using git submodules.

Therefore I like submodules and would argue that people might underestimate the increased round trip time for publishing modules and then referencing them in code compared to using submodules