grpcurl VS grpc-go

grpcurl

The API server will be built and start running on port 50051. You can test the functionality using a gRPC client of your choice like grpcurl or Postman.

> What is the ubiquitous utility for interacting with gRPC? We have curl for REST. What is openAPI of gRPC?

grpcurl[1] combined with gRPC server reflection[2]. The schema is compiled into the server as an encoded proto which is exposed via server reflection, which grpcurl reads to send correctly encoded requests.

[1] https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl

The whole idea behind the post is that accessing the gRPC service with regular tools is impossible. To test, we need a dedicated tool nonetheless. I found grpcurl. Let's install it and use it to list available services:

gRpcurl is a cool little tool to look at btw. Had to use it at my job before. Can call a gRPC via a curl like command. Regular curl doesn't support HTTP2. Had to use TLS with some tokens even. But you can reference a local .proto(gRPC protobuf file for the call) and make things easier for yourself if you hate reading instructions on command line args like I do.

A simple GRPC client built using grpcurl.

Try testing with grpcurl, using the -H or -rpc-header flags to set the appropriate header.

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