[crabmusket]

> I love the idea of an IDL for describing APIs and a great compiler/codegen (protoc)

Me too. My context is that I end up using RPC-ish patterns when doing slightly out-of-the-ordinary web stuff, like websockets, iframe communications, and web workers.

In each of those situations you start with a bidirectional communication channel, but you have to build your own request-response layer if you need that. JSON-RPC is a good place to start, because the spec is basically just "agree to use `id` to match up requests and responses" and very little else of note.

I've been looking around for a "minimum viable IDL" to add to that, and I think my conclusion so far is "just write out a TypeScript file". This works when all my software is web/TypeScript anyway.

[dpeckett]

Now that's an interesting thought, I wonder if you could use a modified subset of TypeScript to create a IDL/DDL for JSON-RPC. Then compile that schema into implementations for various target languages.

[IggleSniggle]

Typia kinda does this, but currently only has a Typescript -> Typescript compiler.

[crabmusket]

Yeah that's what I'd look into. Maybe TS -> Json Schema -> target language.