[danans]

> We wanted to eliminate the need for each engineer to individually install protoc and multiple plugins and to make generating Go or TypeScript assets a single command a developer could execute.

Couldn't you just make protoc part of your project's git repo?

> This approach ensured that everyone on the team was using identical versions of these tools throughout their development process.

While this does enforce using the same version during development, it also introduces possible differences between code built during development and code built for production (if those are separate processes, as they should be in mature software).

Ideally, production builds should be hermetic and their inputs should only come from the committed source code and tools, not externally hosted ones that evolve independently.

Granted, with a tool as stable (and with such strictly defined interfaces) as protoc, perhaps the risk is minimal, but IMO this isn't a generalizable architecture.

[kostyay]

We usually commit the generated clients/servers to the repo and expect developers to run the code generation on their machines.

[danans]

What's the advantage of calling a locally running server vs running the codegen directly on the command line?