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gRPC is not "typed" in any substantial way. You wan use any payload encoding you feel like suits your worldview. Protobufs happen to be a common choice.

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The gRPC website mentions protocol buffers in the first sentence, and the Wikipedia page says that protocol buffers are used for gRPC. I consider a defacto standard to basically be equivalent to a standard, even if that's not "technically correct".

It is true that gRPC tends to implicitly imply Protocol Buffers. It's the only format that is worked on directly by the gRPC team.

However, C#/C++ Bond, C++ FlatBuffers, and Java Avro have some level of code generation support for gRPC. I'm not very familiar with Microsoft's Bond, but it appears to have generics for both the service and structs.

disclaimer: I'm part of the gRPC team.

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