goprotobuf VS gRPC

Compare goprotobuf vs gRPC and see what are their differences.

gRPC

The C based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#) (by grpc)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
goprotobuf gRPC
13 201
9,546 40,685
0.7% 0.9%
2.8 9.9
about 1 month ago 6 days ago
Go C++
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

goprotobuf

Posts with mentions or reviews of goprotobuf. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-19.
  • Protoc Plugins with Go
    2 projects | dev.to | 19 Aug 2023
    Now let’s take a look at the source code of the protoc-gen-go plugin:
  • How Turborepo is porting from Go to Rust
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jul 2023
  • The Tragic Death of Inheritance
    2 projects | /r/programmingcirclejerk | 5 Jul 2023
    Wait, you say, in Go you can embed a struct with default method implementations to "inherit" them in your composed struct... sure, except any methods called by those methods are early-bound in the original struct, completely ignoring your wrapper, so the best you can do is "not implemented" rather than actually implement something. It is at least a way to prevent semver-major breakage, which the gRPC generator uses, but that's about as far as it gets you.
  • Protobuf - Go support for Google's protocol buffers
    1 project | /r/github_trends | 27 May 2022
  • Passing large amounts of data between processes via a file?
    1 project | /r/golang | 24 Mar 2022
    The classic answer is protobufs. You can serialize out to binary format.
  • 2022-01-11 gRPC benchmark results
    3 projects | /r/grpc | 12 Jan 2022
    Seems like go is pretty middle of the road. I can only guess as to why but it probably has to do with heavy usage of pointers and reflection which are much slower than other implementations. Gogo/protobuf (RIP) solved this performance with code generation, but the the official go protobuf implementation has essentially eschewed it. I do wonder how the benchmark would look using the new vitess proto library for Go (which has many of the benefits of gogo but with active development and an API built on top of the Google one)
  • A complete yet beginner friendly guide on how to secure Linux
    17 projects | /r/linux | 4 Jun 2021
  • A new ProtoBuf generator for Go
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jun 2021
    Maybe I'm missing something, but my read of [golang/protobuf#364](https://github.com/golang/protobuf/issues/364) was that the re-organization in protobuf-go v2 was allow for optimizations like gogoprotobuf to be developed without requiring a complete fork. I totally understand that the authors of gogoprotobuf do not have the time to re-architect their library to use these hooks, but best I can figure this generator does not use these hooks either. Instead it defines additional member functions, and wrappers that look for those specialized functions and fallback to the generic ones if not found.

    I am thinking about stuff like the [ProtoMethods](https://pkg.go.dev/google.golang.org/[email protected]/reflec...) API.

    I wonder why not? Did the authors of the vtprotobuf extension not want to bite off that much work? Is the new API not sufficient to do what they want (thus failing some of the goals expressed in golang/protobuf#364?

  • How to Auto Generate JavaScript code using GO
    2 projects | /r/golang | 9 May 2021
    In this case try approach with line by line generation. Very much like what protoc-gen-go does for Go code: https://github.com/golang/protobuf/blob/ae97035608a719c7a1c1c41bed0ae0744bdb0c6f/protoc-gen-go/grpc/grpc.go#L142, need to implement this kind of generator yourself.
  • Writing a code generator in Go
    3 projects | /r/golang | 26 Apr 2021
    Something like this: https://github.com/golang/protobuf/blob/master/internal/gengogrpc/grpc.go

gRPC

Posts with mentions or reviews of gRPC. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-03.
  • Golang: out-of-box backpressure handling with gRPC, proven by a Grafana dashboard
    4 projects | dev.to | 3 Apr 2024
    gRPC, built on HTTP/2, inherently supports flow control. The server can push updates, but it must also respect flow control signals from the client, ensuring that it doesn't send data faster than what the client can handle.
  • Reverse Engineering Protobuf Definitions from Compiled Binaries
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Mar 2024
    Yes, grpc_cli tool uses essentially the same mechanism except implemented as a grpc service rather than as a stubby service. The basic principle of both is implementing the C++ proto library's DescriptorDatabase interface with cached recursive queries of (usually) the server's compiled in FileDescriptorProtos.

    See also https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/server-reflecti...

    The primary difference between what grpc does and what stubby does is that grpc uses a stream to ensure that the reflection requests all go to the same server to avoid incompatible version skew and duplicate proto transmissions. With that said, in practice version skew is rarely a problem for grpc_cli style "issue a single RPC" usecases: even if requests do go to two or more different versions of a binary that might have incompatible proto graphs, it is very common for the request and response and RPC to all be in the same proto file so you only need to make one RPC in the first place unless you're using an extension mechanism like proto2 extensions or google.protobuf.Any.

  • Delving Deeper: Enriching Microservices with Golang with CloudWeGo
    7 projects | dev.to | 22 Feb 2024
    While gRPC and Apache Thrift have served the microservice architecture well, CloudWeGo's advanced features and performance metrics set it apart as a promising open source solution for the future.
  • gRPC Name Resolution & Load Balancing on Kubernetes: Everything you need to know (and probably a bit more)
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Feb 2024
    The loadBalancingConfig is what we use in order to decide which policy to go for (round_robin in this case). This JSON representation is based on a protobuf message, then why does the name resolver returns it in the JSON format? The main reason is that loadBalancingConfig is a oneof field inside the proto message and so it can not contain values unknown to the gRPC if used in the proto format. The JSON representation does not have this requirement so we can use a custom loadBalancingConfig .
  • Dart on the Server: Exploring Server-Side Dart Technologies in 2024
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Jan 2024
    The Dart implementation of gRPC which puts mobile and HTTP/2 first. It's built and maintained by the Dart team. gRPC is a high-performance RPC (remote procedure call) framework that is optimized for efficient data transfer.
  • Usando Spring Boot RestClient
    4 projects | dev.to | 30 Jan 2024
  • How to Build & Deploy Scalable Microservices with NodeJS, TypeScript and Docker || A Comprehesive Guide
    13 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2024
    gRPC is a high-performance, open-source RPC (Remote Procedure Call) framework initially developed by Google. It uses Protocol Buffers for serialization and supports bidirectional streaming.
  • Actual SSH over HTTPS
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Dec 2023
    In general, tunneling through HTTP2 turns out to be a great choice. There is a RPC protocol built on top of HTTP2: gRPC[1].

    This is because HTTP2 is great at exploiting a TCP connection to transmit and receive multiple data structures concurrently - multiplexing.

    There may not be a reason to use HTTP3 however, as QUIC already provides multiplexing.

    I expect that in the future most communications will be over encrypted HTTP2 and QUIC simply because middleware creators can not resist to discriminate.

    [1] <https://grpc.io>

  • Why gRPC is not natively supported by Browsers
    1 project | dev.to | 17 Dec 2023
    Even in the https://grpc.io blog says this
  • SGSG (Svelte + Go + SQLite + gRPC) - open source application
    5 projects | /r/sveltejs | 6 Dec 2023
    gRPC

What are some alternatives?

When comparing goprotobuf and gRPC you can also consider the following projects:

colfer - binary serialization format

ZeroMQ - ZeroMQ core engine in C++, implements ZMTP/3.1

gogoprotobuf - [Deprecated] Protocol Buffers for Go with Gadgets

Apache Thrift - Apache Thrift

jsoniter - A high-performance 100% compatible drop-in replacement of "encoding/json"

Cap'n Proto - Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library

cbor - CBOR codec (RFC 8949) with CBOR tags, Go struct tags (toarray, keyasint, omitempty), float64/32/16, big.Int, and fuzz tested billions of execs.

zeroRPC - zerorpc for python

mapstructure - Go library for decoding generic map values into native Go structures and vice versa.

rpclib - rpclib is a modern C++ msgpack-RPC server and client library

asn1

nanomsg - nanomsg library