gRPC-Web is going GA

Re:gRPC-Web is going GA by andy_ppp on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @05:23PM (#18296537)

gRPC is lightweight, highly performant, difficult to debug, difficult to detect breaking schema changes, lots of magic going on to learn compared to REST or GraphQL.

GraphQL is much heavier, easier to test and debug and has some performance optimisations like data loader and is better for multiple clients to consume. I’d say it’s easier to manage schema changes but it’s probably not empirical. I guess huge overheads by comparison to gRPC but I’m guessing data over the wire is a much larger piece of the pie.

Personally think GraphQL is far superior for web clients and I think gRPC for services in general can be a pretty large overhead for most teams... at least initially you are going to get things done much faster with restful services.

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Re:gRPC-Web is going GA by anentropic on Thursday October 25, 2018 @04:32AM (#18299393)

as someone without experience in gRPC but interested to use it, I am curious why it was difficult to detect breaking schema changes?

thanks

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Re:gRPC-Web is going GA by andy_ppp on Thursday October 25, 2018 @06:50AM (#18299917)

Because the schema is based on a numbered position rather than a field name. This means you need to never rename positions - if you want to deprecate fields you just loose the numbering. Numbers 0-15 use less space in the message than others for example.

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