Comment by akshayshah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akshayshah | Hacker News Reader

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gRPC had a graduation application open for 3 years. It was rejected very recently: https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/300.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like the main problem is Google's tight control over the project. Apple contributes to the Swift implementation and MSFT drives the native .NET implementation, but there's little non-Google input in decision-making for Go, Java, C++ core, or any of the implementations that wrap core.

More subjectively, I'm impressed by the CNCF's willingness to stick to their stated graduation criteria. gRPC is widely used (even among other CNCF projects), and comes from the company that organized the CNCF - there must have been a lot of pressure to rubber-stamp the application.

100% this. GRPC has nearly all its code contributions by google. If google removed its funding the project would be at risk. It’s closer to a proprietary offering with source code available than a mature FOSS ecosystem. Think redhat enterprise Linux is to gRPC where-as istio/k8s is closer to Debian.

You acknowledge contributions from several large companies. It's obvious it won't go away if Google pulls support or anything. Perhaps the fact that some random folks across the internet don't feel compelled to submit patches is simply due to the low level nature of the project and that it does the job quite well and its scope is limited by its nature, thereby limiting the need for customization by every individual. I really wonder what the standard is. If I recall correctly, for instance a certain proxy graduated by CNCF was such crap at one point that it linear searched routes. That naturally necessitates contributions if you actually use such software in production at scale.

Why is there a need to read between the lines? The post seems quite clear what is needed and it sounds like the ball is just in gRPC court. If anything it seems promising that there was movement after 3.5 years.

It’s really hard to have any influence on it unless you’re inside the Google fence. Even for the primary maintainers of those two external parties that you mentioned.

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