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Type-first is cool. But I think I'll always aim to avoid gRPC, at least in part because grpc-web was so completely broken. I also have an instinctive aversion to binary formats. YMMV, just my PoV.

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I’ve had a lot of success with grpc web. Had to patch a couple of things along the way. My biggest misgiving is thinking having bigints would be a good idea (it is not a good idea). Aside from that though, I’ve been happy with it. What felt broken to you?

One thing I still struggle to this day is the float/long conversion from json <-> proto. It somehow works and I still untangle the feeling of magic.

Its generated "TypeScript"... wasn't.

+1 Couple of things I really hate about proto - No generics/templates. No composition of services or mixins (you do have composition in messages but that feels very limited). Also the clunkiness around having to declare more things (try a repeated map field or a map of repeated fields).

My comment about protos was just the spec (and was seperating the binary formats as a different concern). But your concerns are pretty valid.

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