grpc-go VS Protobuf

The reflection service is open-sourced (at least for some sdks):

* https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/blob/master/Documentation/se...

* https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/grpc/g...

We’re hoping to make this rate at least optional via this pull request but as the time of writing this blog, it’s nothing we can do to circle our way around it.

First, I started with gRPC’s recommended starter repository for learning gRPC, their **helloworld **example, which is a part of the official gRPC repository.

IDE: use whatever make you productive. I personally use vscode. VCS: git, as golang communities use github heavily as base for many libraries. AFAIK Linter: use staticcheck for linting as it looks like mostly used linting tool in go, supported by many also. In Vscode it will be recommended once you install go plugin. Libraries/Framework: actually the standard libraries already included many things you need, decent enough for your day-to-day development cycles(e.g. `net/http`). But here are things for extra: - Struct fields validator: validator - Http server lib: chi router , httprouter , fasthttp (for non standard http implementations, but fast) - Web Framework: echo , gin , fiber , beego , etc - Http client lib: most already covered by stdlib(net/http), so you rarely need extra lib for this, but if you really need some are: resty - CLI: cobra - Config: godotenv , viper - DB Drivers: sqlx , postgre , sqlite , mysql - nosql: redis , mongodb , elasticsearch - ORM: gorm , entgo , sqlc(codegen) - JS Transpiler: gopherjs - GUI: fyne - grpc: grpc - logging: zerolog - test: testify , gomock , dockertest - and many others you can find here

If you read the first comment, you’ll see the API was documented as being experimental.

https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/issues/3798#issuecomment-670...

The lack of this analysis still results in bugs and CVEs. See how many races are found and fixed in gRPC releases: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/releases (search "race"). It's a shame Google does not publish these as CVEs, because many of them qualify.

I like to point people at this release to show that not even Google -- in its own language on its own library for its own RPC protocol -- can write thread-safe Go, so what chance does anyone else have. Maybe we have to stop thinking of Go as a language for mission critical parallel computing and think of it more like a Python 4 made for low-risk prototyping. Mature libraries help for that prototyping, you know how to put them together and get something working, that something just won't be scaleable, efficient, or thread-safe.

I first learned about this technique when gRPC generated code started using it. See the short readme and the long issue discussion. I think a lot more of the rationale from the discussion should have made it into the readme, since this is the only time most Go developers will ever see this technique used, especially since it can't be retrofitted to existing interfaces without breaking existing implementations.

I don't have any experience with goRPC (I'm assuming you're referring to https://github.com/valyala/gorpc), but just to note that that repo hasn't been updated in 7 years and has open issues that are that old, too. https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go has 17.5k stars and is actively maintained. That doesn't say anything about their relative performance - goRPC might be faster - but you probably won't have a fun time if you run into issues.

Found the root cause from https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/commit/383b1143 (original issue: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/issues/75):

    // Note that ServeHTTP uses Go's HTTP/2 server implementation which is

For at least 4 years protobuf has had decent support for self-describing messages (very similar to avro) as well as reflection

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

Xgooglers trying to make do on the cheap will just create a Union of all their messages and include the message def in a self-describing message pattern. Super-sensitive network I/O can elide the message def (empty buffer) and any for RecordIO clone well file compression takes care of the definition.

Definitely useful to be able to dig out old defs but protobuf maintainers have surprisingly added useful features so you don’t have to.

Bonus points tho for extracting the protobuf defs that e.g. Apple bakes into their binaries.

gRPC Gateway is a protoc plugin that reads gRPC service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server that translates a RESTful JSON API into gRPC.

To use more recent versions of protoc in future applications, you can download them from the Protobuf repository.

Use the Protobuf CLI protoc and the plugin protoc-gen-tonic.

> didn’t find any standard for separating protobuf messages

The fact that protobufs are not self-delimiting is an endless source of frustration, but I know of 2 standards:

- SerializeDelimited* is part of the protobuf library: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

- Riegeli is "a file format for storing a sequence of string records, typically serialized protocol buffers. It supports dense compression, fast decoding, seeking, detection and optional skipping of data corruption, filtering of proto message fields for even faster decoding, and parallel encoding": https://github.com/google/riegeli

It looks like it is in fact universal. Just glancing at the code here, it looks like the tool searches any arbitrary file for bytes that look like encoded protobuf descriptors, specifically looking for bytes that are plausibly the beginning of a FileDescriptorProto message defined here:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

This takes advantage of the fact that such descriptors are commonly compiled into programs that use protobuf. The descriptors are usually embedded as constant byte arrays. That said, not all protobuf implementations embed the descriptors and those that do often have an option to inhibit such embedding (at the expense of losing some dynamic introspection features).

Not much. You can check the source code in https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf. For example, for serializing a boolean in C#: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/csharp/src/Google.Protobuf/WritingPrimitives.cs#L165. Strings and objects are a bit more complicated, but it is all about turning the data into its byte representation.

One of the key feature of gRPC is protobuf .proto file(nothing but just a contract for me between two communicator code components) This file and protobuff compiler is so mature, then it generates a direct client implementation using protoccompiler. ref