twirp VS protobuf-ts

The next time I want to build an API, I will probably make use of https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp. I like working with Protobuf and having strongly-typed and well-defined messages, but gRPC is way, way too much. It's obviously a Google product, built for what Google needs.

Use Protobuf for messages, but just use HTTP for transport.

- Twirp (Twitch light version of gRPC, with optional JSON encoding, HTTP1 support and without streaming) - https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp

There is another: twirp

And addition to what was mentioned there are also webrpc and twirp.

If you find one, you maybe also interested in twirp.

Twitch has a great framework for it https://twitchtv.github.io/twirp/docs/intro.html

We have better experience with https://goa.design/ than with https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp

Take a look at Twirp (https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp) open sourced by TwitchTv. It's a lot lighter weight than gRPC. It does use Protobufs but addresses some of the concerns you mentioned, such as being able to test with JSON payloads, works over HTTP 1.1 and HTTP/2, good client libraries, and doesn't require a proxy.

They address your concerns in more detail in the Twirp release announcement (2018) - https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2018/01/16/twirp-a-sweet-new-rpc-f...

DX for front or back end? The beauty of tRPC is that the types are derived/inferred from the backend runtime code (like, as you type). It would be nigh impossible to do that with grpc(-web) using proto files as the source of truth.

It's possible there's a project out there which could automatically produce proto files from something like zod, json-schema, etc. which could be directly interpreted by TS to provide similar (as you type) DX while still allowing some other language backend to consume the derived proto files (though the DX there would be less than ideal).

If you're just looking for similar TS clients/interfaces for grpc-web then I'd recommend https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts which operates on plain JS objects (no new MyMessage().serialize(), instead the code generator mostly produces TS interfaces for you to work against: const myMessage: MyMessage = pojoConformingToInterface; const binary = MyMessage.toBinary(myMessage);)

https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts (RpcMetaData) https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts/blob/main/MANUAL.md

The second big difference is that we now have auto-generated client and server stubs. For this task, I chose to use buf and the protobuf-ts plugin in order to generate idiomatic Typescript classes and objects. Not only do these classes describe the types we'll use in the server and client, but also includes the actual gRPC implementations used to serialize and send messages back and forth across the wire.

I wouldn’t use grpc with web if you can avoid it. If you’re looking for a ts protobuf library I can recommend this one https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts

https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts looks interesting too.

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

Use a GRPC library for frontend, assuming you want to go with Typescript take a look at https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts Frontend frameworks like Angular/React/Vue don't define what and how to implement backend communication. You can use what you want and how you want it.

And there's also this which is by the same author but came before it: https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts

The latter has code-generation for services and has various transport packages for twirp, grpc, and grpc-web.

This looks very interesting! Anything that can move people away from protobuf.js (which seems to no longer be maintained and depends on prototype values for "default values" meaning that you can't send deserialized protobuf messages to/from web workers) and the "native" JS codegen by Google (which produces code that is both very slow and a awkward to use) is a win in my book.

We're currently using https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts which has been fantastic. It's codegen is dependent on the protoc binary as it is implemented as a protoc plugin, but the code it generates passes the protobuf conformance tests. The generated code also outputs plain objects when deserializing protobuf messages which means it works perfectly when sending stuff to/from web workers. It also has grpc, grpc-web, and twirp clients.