[jeffbee]

"Adds a build step" is just not a thing you notice in any way if you also use Bazel, which I imagine Google imagines everyone doing. I don't really agree with any of the complaints in this article since they are sort of vague and apparently from the point of view of browsers, whereas I am a backend developer, but I think there is a large universe of things to complain about with gRPC. First and foremost, it seems as though bazel, protobuf C++, and gRPC C++ developers have never spoken to each other and are apparently not aware that it is almost impossible to build and link a gRPC C++ server with bazel. The bazel people have made it impossible to build protobuf with bazel 7 and the protobuf people have made it impossble to use bazel with protobuf 27, while the gRPC people and the rules_proto people are not even in the conversation. The other complaint from the C++ side is that the implementation is now so slow that Go and Java beat it easily, making C++ people look stupid at work.

[rstat1]

The last time I attempted to use GRPC++ it was pretty hard to build even without the heaping monstrosity that is Bazel.