Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by GauntletWizard 4112 days ago
Having recently left Google, GRPC (stubby) was my biggest concern; I spent about two weeks hacking together a good code generator for GoRPC before GRPC came out and obviated the time. Now, I'm glad I haven't bothered with a build system, which was going to be next.

Nice to see a bunch of projects that've been generalizable and heavily used internally finally see the light of the outside world. Now, to start evangelizing them.
1 comments
oppositelock 4112 days ago
A huge +1 on this as well.

I left Google a couple of years ago and we ended up building our own rpc around protos (Thrift just doesn't cut it), and our Make/maven based build has the standard problems with such things, so I'm really looking forward to using grpc and bazel in the near future. A huge thumbs up to Google!

link
beagle3 4112 days ago
Can you give a (very quick) pointer/explanation to what about Thrift didn't cut it for you?
link
GauntletWizard 4111 days ago
The description language is oddly bulky and can't decide what order it's in.

The api to open a connection is, again, needlessly bulky: I make a socket, I wrap it in a buffer, I wrap it in a protocol, I create a client using it, then I connect? There's the same level of complexity offered in grpc, but it's offered through an options object with sane defaults.

There's no security protocol; or, if there is, nobody seems to use it. Is there an async call structure? If there is, nobody's ever heard of it. All the code I can find seems to be written at a preschool level. This may be due to working at a company that was an early adopter, or simply because the company is staffed by preschoolers.

link
ori_b 4111 days ago
As someone that used to work at Google, and currently works at Facebook, there's a lot of legacy API that you can mostly ignore. Async is there, but more or less just works, and uses C++11 lambdas quite nicely.

I think I preferred Google RPC, but it's not a huge difference to me.

link
hueving 4111 days ago
It wasn't invented in Google and is therefore inferior. Google has a massive incentive to develop projects specific to their requirements and then open source and evangelize them to stomp out approaches not optimized for them.
link
nevir 4111 days ago
Don't forget that there is a constant inflow of developers to Google. They all bring the tools and practices that they know, and will definitely leverage what they can.

It's not like we're run through a brainwashing machine when walking through the door :P

There just happen to be a lot of challenges to make things run on Google's infrastructure - and not all the tools we know and love happen to work well on it. Some of that is legacy, some of that doesn't have many parallels externally.

So, we write solutions that work well on Google's infrastructure. Some of that gets open sourced, in the hopes that it's also useful to the greater community.

But I definitely would not consider Google-written code to be superior to other solutions out there - just an alternative option to choose from - and certainly not the best for many situations.

link