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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

I think what they mean is by defining the contract first as a .proto file, and by having type-safe languages automatically read them and generate code, they are able to have a sort of cross language type safety.

If you create a method like

    double GetThing();

and then you want to change it to:

    int GetThing();

All you have to do is change it in your proto, then both the typescript in the browser and the go code in the server will adapt, and shout at compile time if the types don't match. This wasn't the case when the server was sending JSON to a web listener. You'd have to hunt down the dependency to that method and change it.

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But unless you control all client code, you can't check the client code at server compile time.

You're still breaking and forcing a refactor by all your clients and there's no way to track that with type safety.

That said, this use case seems to be for a single web front end and go back end but that part is left out of the title.

Protos are fine, google likes protos, gRPC works for Google because they have that insane CI system that builds every project at once...but any schema would work and you can be generating and checking against a schema for a JSON API as well. You don't need to move past REST and JSON to get what you're asking for.

I am aware this is not a real life scenario, I'm just saying what he calls type-safe, is actually something like cross-language-static-typing.

GP was a bad example. You probably wouldn't have an RPC returning a simple type. It would instead return a message (aka a Go struct, or an object in JS) which has various fields (or even just a single field). Protobuf messages have built-in backwards compatibility as long as you don't change field numbers. That way you can incrementally change your messages without breaking older clients.

To change this without breaking existing users, including internal ones, you shouldn't redefine the method signature, you should add a new one and deprecate the old one.

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