Comment by kjuulh
11 days ago
I think connect-rpc[0] strikes a good balance between normal http apis, and gRPC. It allows protobuf as json. So you could think of it as an opinionated http api spec. A health check would be just a call to an url /something.v1.MyService/MyMethod -d { "input": "something }.
it works really well, and the tooling is pretty good, though it isn't that widely supported yet. Rust for one doesn't have an implementation. But I've been using it at work, and we basically haven't had any issues with it (go and typescript).
But the good thing is that it can interoperate with normal grpc servers, etc. But that of course locks it into using the protobuf wireformat, which is part of the trouble ;)
+1 for connect-rpc. After go-micro‘s maintainer went off the rails, I ripped it all out and switched to connect.
> After go-micro‘s maintainer went off the rails
What do you mean by this? Genuinely curious, as someone who's followed that project in the past.
He probably means when I took VC funding in 2019 and started to rip apart the framework to try build a platform and business. The 2-3 years after were very chaotic.
My goal was never to serve the community but instead leverage it to build a business. Ultimately that failed. The truth is it's very difficult to sustain open source. Go-micro was never the end goal. It was always a stepping stone to a platform e.g microservices PaaS. A lot of hard lessons learned along the way.
Now with Copilot and AI I'm able to go back and fix a lot of issues but nothing will fix trust with a community or the passage of time. People move on. It served a certain purpose at certain time.
Note: The company behind connect-rpc raised $100m but for more of a build system around protobuf as opposed to the rpc framework but this was my thinking as well. The ability to raise $10-20m would create the space to build the platform off the back of the success of the framework.
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Using connectrpc was a pretty refreshing experience for me. Implementing a client for the HTTP stuff at least is pretty easy! I was able to implement a basic runner for forgejo using the protobuf spec for the runner + libcurl within a few days.