protobuf-es VS network

Yes, you can. You are mistaking protobuf with gRPC. See this for more information.

You can use this with connect: https://github.com/bufbuild/protobuf-es

Ah you should check out https://github.com/bufbuild/protobuf-es which feels great so far. Then there's connect by the same buf people but it has a grpc-web option https://connect.build/docs/web/getting-started/. The amount of code generated is also tiny, which I love.

I'd recommend looking into protobuf-ts (Timo from Buf) or protobuf-es (Buf maintained).

Not sure if it is a magic bullet, but it was definitely written by TypeScript developers, for TypeScript developers.

The generated TypeScript code is already pretty minimal because all serialization ops are implemented with reflection instead of generated code (which is only marginally slower than generated code in JS).

But you can also switch to generating JavaScript + TypeScript declaration files, which is truly minimal: JavaScript is an entire dynamic language, so we actually only generated a small snippet of metadata in the .js output, and create a class at run time with a function call. The generated typings (.d.ts) give you type safety, autocompletion in the IDE, and so on.

You can see the output here: https://github.com/bufbuild/protobuf-es/blob/main/packages/p...

So funny you say this. I think it's the insight of many developers including my own. I hacked together a framework that did this before the existence of GRPC. Now I'm trying to formalise it as a protocol. https://github.com/micro/network/blob/main/PROTOCOL.md

Alright, let me throw my hat into this ring with a totally unfinished idea. I started working on a design for something called the Micro Communication Protocol (MUCP) [1]. It's a header based protocol that's transport agnostic and focuses on service-to-service communication. An early prototype existed in Micro [2] but I'm primarily focused on redesigning the protocol before re-implementing it. Micro was geared towards API first services but I'm looking to expand the scope and try to build a UI layer on top. Most of the protocols focused very much on communication between people but I think if you focus on service-to-service communication more broadly it opens up the avenue to all sorts of multiplayer collaboration.

- [1] https://github.com/micro/network/blob/main/PROTOCOL.md

Yea like you're part of this club that has exclusive access to something, you contribute to it, deliver value, see it grow and then it's gone when you leave. It exists within a silo and for the better part of a decade that's really irked me but I haven't quite figured out how to solve for that problem beyond doing it in a shared open source repo and a shared platform. I think I the issue is it's bigger than any one person and you have to find a way to sell thousands of people on the idea. My starting point was code and now I wonder could I have approached this differently? Is there another path in which this would actually succeed? I'm still trying to figure it out and it's driving me crazy. Next I'll be writing a protocol no joke https://github.com/micro/network