Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by plorkyeran 1418 days ago
Being able to use gRPC in browsers was an explicit goal of the project, and that is impossible. gRPC-Web has to use a modified version of the protocol that has a limited feature set and performs worse for the reasons described in the article.
2 comments

The lack of trailers support is not what means gRPC-Web needs to exist. It would be trivial for gRPC to support trailers-in-body like gRPC-Web does as a work around. The main problem for gRPC in the browser is the lack of HTTP/2 framing for messages which means gRPC-Web has to invent it's own framing format to make streams work.

My experience in the early days of gRPC is that they seemed fairly unwilling to consider any need for an easy upgrade path for existing people using HTTP/1.1 at all.

The author touches on this at the end:

> Focus on customers. Despite locking horns with other orgs, our team had a more critical problem: we didn’t listen to early customer feedback.

I'm glad they realise it now because lots of us warned them about this at the time.

Lets call the next version gRPC Send. then the vp can "leave" after a year or so, the project can get scrapped, and we can go back to something decent XD