[ants_everywhere]

Personally I'll never go back to REST because you lose important typing information. The complexity doesn't go away. In the RPC/codegen paradigm the complexity is in the tooling and is handled by machines. In REST, it's in the minds of your programmers and gets sprinkled throughout the code.

> You need to compile the protobufs and update all services that use them.

You need to update all the services when you change your REST API too right? At least protobufs generates your code automatically for you, and it can do it as part of your build process as soon as you change your proto. Changes are backwards compatible so you don't even need to change your services until they need to change.

[bairen]

Its silly to think protobufs code gen is a advantage. I can take a json object/xml/csv from any API and plug it into a website that will spit out models in any language I want.

The only real advantage of grpc and protobufs have are speed and reduced data transmission.

And hey fair enough man if those are your bottle necks.

[mike_hearn]

How will you know the generated model actually represents everything that can be in the API if you don't have a schema?