[gghoop]

I dislike the use of gRPC within the data center. People reach for it citing performance, but gRPC is not high performance and the quality of the available open source clients is very poor, particularly outside of the core C++/Java implementations like the nodejs implementation. I am not against the use of protobuf as an API spec but it should be possible to use it with a framing protocol over TCP, there just isn't a clear dominant choice for that way of doing RPC. When it comes to web based APIs I am more in favour of readable payloads, but there are issues here since we tend to use JSON but the type specificity is loose, which leads to interop problems between backend languages, particularly in nodejs where JSON parse is used to implement a schema mapping. In order to do this properly, encoders and decoders need to be generated explicitly from schemas, which somewhat diminishes the use of JSON within the context of JS.

[mvdtnz]

In what situation is performance enough of a concern that you would consider gRPC but not enough of a concern that you would let nodeJS anywhere near your stack?

[gghoop]

No one is picking Nodejs for high performance, but when it is chosen for other reasons it's still expected to perform well. The Nodejs gRPC library performs poorly relatively to the overall performance characteristics of Nodejs, and this is a problem because most of the work performed by typical Nodejs services is API-related work (sending data, encoding and decoding payloads, managing sockets etc). That's not even touching on the bugs in the http2 implementation in node core or the grpc library itself, but much of the selling point of gRPC is supposedly the language interop, and this seems like false advertising to me.

[MobiusHorizons]

I would imagine the reason is really that Google internally doesn't allow NodeJS in production, so the tooling for gRPC for NodeJS does not benefit from the same level of scrutiny as languages Google uses internally.

[jahewson]

I agree, though Zod greatly helps with the JS schema issue. I’m keeping an eye on Microsoft’s TypeSpec project too: typespec.io for interoperable schema generation.

[kyrra]

The main benefit of protos is interop between various languages. If you are a single language tech stack, it matters less.

Also, if you use languages outside of Google's primary languages, you're likely not going to get as good of an experience.

[whoevercares]

There was a talk in 2023 of a non-TCP based protocol, Homa in RPC for data center use-case https://youtu.be/xQQT8YUvWg8?si=g3u5TogBe0_QpPpj.