[TrezyCodes]

Hey there, I'm Trezy and I manage DevRel for Loophole! I can't tell you how excited I am about this release.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments here! If I can't answer them directly, I'll pull in somebody who can.

[sundbry]

Hi, some questions -

1) Does the fRPC protobuf binary format support the same backwards/forwards compatibility between message versions as the standard?

2) How does performance compare to C++ with arena allocations? Did you benchmark a c++ impelementation vs gRPC?

[TrezyCodes]

=== Does fRPC support protobuf backwards/forwards compatibility between message versions? TL;DR - We don't currently, but we plan to.

We've built our own protobuf library called Polyglot, which encodes messages in an order based on their types rather than the number associated with the proto3 file. Because of this, we don't currently support backwards and forwards compatibility the way gRPC does.

=== Performance comparison with C++ arena allocations TL;DR - We don't have specific benchmarks for this (yet).

C++ arena memory allocations are similar to Go's memory pools in the way they try to pre-allocate and reuse memory. fRPC is written in Go, but it doesn't currently use memory pools. Adding support for them is on the roadmap, though! that's a future optimisation that we expect will provide even further performance optimisations.

As far as C++ goes, though, the library is currently written in Go and we don't have a C++ version on the roadmap. That said, this is brand new and we're absolutely listening to determine if it makes sense to implement fRPC in other languages, such as C++ and Rust.