Comment by cyberax
3 days ago
Just use gRPC or ConnectRPC (which is basically gRPC but over regular HTTP). It's simple and rigid.
REST is just too "floppy", there are too many ways to do things. You can transfer data as a part of the path, as query parameters, as POST fields (in multiple encodings!), as multipart forms, as streaming data, etc.
Just not in C++ code. gprc has a bajillon dependencies, and upgrades are a major pain. If you have a dedicated build team and they are willing to support this - sure, go ahead and use it.
But if you have multiple targets, or unusual compilers, or don't enjoy working with build systems, stay away from complex stuff. Sure, REST may need some manual scaffolding, but no matter what your target is, there is a very good chance it has JSON and HTTP libs.
The critical problem with gRPC is that it uses protocol buffers.
Which are...terrible.
Example: structured schema, but no way to require fields.
Well the competition is REST which doesn’t have a schema or required fields, so not much of a problem.
> Well the competition is REST which doesn’t have a schema or required fields, so not much of a problem.
A vague architecture style is not competition to a concrete framework. At best, you're claiming that the competition to gRPC is rolling your own ad-hoc RPC implementation.
What I expect to happen now is an epiphany. Why do most developers look at tools like gRPC and still decide it's a far better option to roll their own HTTP-based RPC interface? I mean, it's a rational choice for most. Think about that for a moment.
With Protobuf this is a conscious decision to avoid back-compat issues. I'm not sure if I like it.
That's exactly how these systems fail in the marketplace. You make one decision that's good for, say, 50% of cases but disqualifying for 50% of cases and you lose 50% of the market.
Make 5 decisions like that and you lost 31/32 of the market.
Infra teams like it, app devs don't like it.
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Some people complain about that, but I have yet to see anyone demonstrate that this is an actual problem. Show me the scenario where this is a show stopper.
You have all the permutations that sail under the name "REST" to some degree, where there seems to be no rules and everyone does something different. And then you have an RPC mechanism that is about two orders of magnitude tigher and people complain about not having required fields? How? Why? What are they on about?
I mean, if you write validation code for every type, by hand, you will probably still have to do less overall work than for REST'ish monstrosities. But since you have a lot more regularity, you can actually generate this code. Or use reflection.
How much time do people really spend on their interface types? After the initial design I rarely touch them. They're like less than a percent of the overall work.
People get stuff done despite at all that.
I'd agree with your great-grandparent post... people get stuff done because of that.
There has been no lack of heavyweight, pre-declare everything, code-generating, highly structured, prescriptive standards that sloppyREST has casually dispatched (pun fully intended) in the real world. After some 30+ years of highly prescriptive RPC mechanisms, at some point it becomes time to stop waiting for those things to unseat "sloppy" mechanisms and it's time to simply take it as a brute fact and start examining why that's the case.
Fortunately, in 2025, if you have a use case for such a system, and there are many many such valid use cases, you have a number of solid options to choose from. Fortunately sloppyREST hasn't truly killed them. But the fact that it empirically dominates it in the wild even so is now a fact older than many people reading this, and bears examination in that light rather than casual dismissals. It's easy to list the negatives, but there must be some positives that make it so popular with so many.
> There has been no lack of heavyweight, pre-declare everything, code-generating, highly structured, prescriptive standards
Care to list them? REST mania started around early 2000-s, and at that time there was only CORBA available as a cross-language portable RPC. Microsoft had DCOM.
And that was it. There was almost nothing else.
It was so bad that ZeroC priced their ICE suite based on a PERCENTAGE OF GROSS SALES: https://web.archive.org/web/20040603094344/http://www.zeroc.... Their ICE suite was basically an RPC with a human-designed IDL and non-crazy bindings for C/C++/Java.
Then the situation got WORSE when SOAP came.
At this point, anything, literally anything, that didn't involve XML was greeted with enthusiasm.
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People got things done with flint axes too. It isn't really a useful argument.
I mean... I used to get stuff done with CORBA and DCOM.
It's the question of long-term consequences for supportability and product evolution. Will the next person supporting the API know all the hidden gotchas?
> REST is just too "floppy", there are too many ways to do things.
I think there is some degree of confusion in your reply. You're trying to compare a framework with an architecture style. It's like comparing, say, OData with rpc-over-HTTP.
In practical reality the distinction is mostly, if not completely, without a meaningful difference. The words "practical" and "meaningful" being key. The distinction only has relevance if one engages in pedantry. Or possibly some form of academic self-pleasuring.
I'm aware this is an unappealingly rustic reality, but it is nonetheless the reality experienced by most.
Besides in the practical world we are able to observe, REST isn't even an architectural style: it is several architectural styles multiplied by every possible permutation of how you address a dozen or more different concerns. Necessitating disambiguation whenever you talk about it. First to state the obvious, that it isn't really what Fielding described, then on to communicating what vector describes your particular permutation of choices.
It's okay. We don't need to pretend any of us care about REST beyond as an interesting academic exercise.
You can mess up grpc just as much. Errors are a good place to start.
Could you elaborate?
Wait until you hear about errors in REST...
What about errors in REST? It's HTTP status codes, and implementations are free to pick whatever approach they want for response documents. Some frameworks default to using Problem Details responses, but no one forces that.
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I don't see the point of ConnectRPC.