rules_go VS gRPC

There’s an issue I reported (along with a proof of concept fix) over 4 years ago, that has yet to be fixed: building a mixed source project containing Go & C++ & C++ protocol buffers results in silently broken binaries as rules_go will happily not forward along the linker arguments that the C++ build targets (the protobuf ones, using the built in C++ rules) declare.

See https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/issues/1486

Not very confidence inspiring when Google’s build system falls over when you combine three technologies that are used commonly throughout Google’s code base (two of which were created by Google).

If you’re Google, sure, use Bazel. Otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend it. Google will cater to their needs and their needs only — putting the code out in the open means you get the privilege of sharing in their tech debt, and if something isn’t working, you can contribute your labor to them for free.

No thanks :)

Bazel in theory maintains its own directory of generated code that your IDE should refer to. Back when I last used Bazel, there was a bug open to make gopls properly understand this ("go packages driver" is the search term). Nobody touched this bug for a couple years, so I gave up.

Here's the bug: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/issues/512

I basically wouldn't use Bazel with Go. Go already has a build system, Bazel is best for languages that don't ship a build system, like C++.

`proto_library` for building the `.bin` file from protos works great. Generating stubs/messages for "all" languages does not. Each language does not want to implement gRPC rules, the gRPC team does not want to implement rules for each language. Sort of a deadlock situation. For example:

- C++: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/cc_grpc_libra...

- Python: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/python_rules....

- ObjC: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/objc_grpc_lib...

- Java: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/java_grpc_libr...

- Go (different semantics than all of the other): https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/blob/master/proto/def...

But there's also no real cohesion within the community. The biggest effort to date has been in https://github.com/stackb/rules_proto which integrates with gazelle.

tl;dr: Low alignment results in diverging implementations that are complicated to understand for newcomers. Buff's approach is much more appealing as it's a "this is the one way to do the right thing" and having it just work by detecting `proto_library` and doing all of the linting/registry stuff automagically in CI would be fantastic.

This can be ugly in some languages. There’s decent go support in VSCode if you follow these copy & paste instructions here https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/wiki/Editor-setup

Bazel go_embed_data

That's not true at all. Case in point In general, this is not a problem that AGC can solve. The language can help (something Java is admittedly particularly bad at) but even so, there'll always be avenues for leaks. That's just the nature of shared things. Interestingly, in the linked grpc case, the leaked memory is only half the problem -- AGC doesn't help at all with the leaked HTTP2 connection.

I've trialled my new image with an existing project via JLink that's heavy on Netty and gRPC the image works great (with a small tweak to exclude grpc-netty-shaded due to grpc-java#9083).

When developing an application, the vast majority of code is written by other people. We import that code and make use of it to get whatever we need done. In this case, the developer of an various android applications are using grpc-java.

`proto_library` for building the `.bin` file from protos works great. Generating stubs/messages for "all" languages does not. Each language does not want to implement gRPC rules, the gRPC team does not want to implement rules for each language. Sort of a deadlock situation. For example:

- C++: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/cc_grpc_libra...

- Python: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/python_rules....

- ObjC: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/objc_grpc_lib...

- Java: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/java_grpc_libr...

- Go (different semantics than all of the other): https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/blob/master/proto/def...

But there's also no real cohesion within the community. The biggest effort to date has been in https://github.com/stackb/rules_proto which integrates with gazelle.

tl;dr: Low alignment results in diverging implementations that are complicated to understand for newcomers. Buff's approach is much more appealing as it's a "this is the one way to do the right thing" and having it just work by detecting `proto_library` and doing all of the linting/registry stuff automagically in CI would be fantastic.

Small clarification (to my understanding, I'm not a Java Guru) on why Java got on top - those Java implementations use something called Direct Executor. It's super performant when there's no chance of a blocking operation. But if you are to do anything more than echo service, you might be in trouble. Other implementations probably don't suffer from the same constraint. The related discussion can be found in this PR.

clone https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java

If you do streaming then the best option would be to use a so called manual flow control. You can find an example here.

Another interesting link is their official grpc-java benchmarks project, which is also used in the benchmark I've posted you.

Both JLink (gRPC#3522) and Graal have some issues; I'm especially concerned about the Serial GC in Graal so will be putting that under some stress soon to see if that confirms my suspicions. I'll also be good when some Java 16 JRE Alpine images appear as the JDK is too bloaty.