[swatcoder]

Exactly because the consumers of those API's exhibit a strong preference for one or the other.

Library/module/API developers often seek to deliver maximimum adaptibility in their interfaces so that consumers of them can satisfy their own more specific/pressing requirements.

[dilyevsky]

imo it's mainly because protos are unusable on the web without something like grpc-web (which requires a proxy) and in general web support in protobufs always seemed like an afterthought, just barely working (if at all) which is kind of ironic considering it came out of Google

[hot_gril]

I've never used protobufs with web, but I don't see why not. gRPC, on the other hand, requires HTTP/2 which can be a luxury. I remember making a side project that uses gRPC a while ago and trying to deploy on GCP AppEngine, only to find out it doesn't support gRPC.

[rco8786]

> I've never used protobufs with web, but I don't see why not

We have a bunch of apis like this where I work. It's a huge pain, tbh. You lose the ability to just curl endpoints, or to see what data came over the wire for debugging, not to mention having to use esoteric client libs because every off-the-shelf one just assumes json over http.

[dilyevsky]

well if you can't use gRPC which, as you correctly notes, is protocol-incompatible with browser APIs, you kinda need to roll your own RPC framework. Various attempts had been made at this - see connectrpc, for example, by the same company that authored this post. imo, big advantage of protobuf/gRPC ecosystem is that Google is doing all the heavy lifting for you, so unless something else catches on with wider community it's going to be pretty risky beyond hobby projects.

[hot_gril]

Yeah, that's why I wouldn't do it. Not totally unusable, but painful.