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The biggest project I’ve used it with was in Java.

Validating the output of the bindings protoc generated was more verbose and error prone than hand serializing data would have been.

The wire protocol is not type safe. It has type tags, but they reuse the same tags for multiple datatypes.

Also, zig-zag integer encoding is slow.

Anyway, it’s a terrible RPC library. Flatbuffer is the only one that I’ve encountered that is worse.

What do you mean with validating the bindings? GRPC is type safe. You don’t have to think about that part anymore.

But as the article mentions OpenAPI is also an RPC library with stub generation.

Manual parsing of the json is imho really Oldskool.

But it depends on your use case. That’s the whole point: it depends.

> The wire protocol is not type safe. It has type tags, but they reuse the same tags for multiple datatypes.

When is this ever an issue in practice? Why would the client read int32 but then all of a sudden decide to read uint32?

I guess backwards incompatible changes to the protocol? But yeah, don't do that if you're using protobuf; it's intentionally not robust to it.