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I agree, I love protobuf and JSONSchema and Thrift, I think they're great ideas that solve important problems. But the hype is getting carried away--they aren'
by cle 9y ago
I agree, I love protobuf and JSONSchema and Thrift, I think they're great ideas that solve important problems.
But the hype is getting carried away--they aren't a silver bullet for distributed systems, they're just a way to manage schema. Define a schema in an IDL, and Protobuf/Thrift/whatever generate schema validators and serializer/deserializers for clients and servers. But they are not type safe across systems, and that they compile doesn't imply anything about whether they will actually work at runtime.
- stickfigure 9y agoSure, and gRPC doesn't guarantee that the server is turned on when the client makes a request. Some expectations are unreasonable. On the other hand, if you publish one set of proto files and all clients & servers consume these artifacts, the system as a whole is more "typesafe" and reliable than if you just post swagger docs and expect all your developers to check them daily for updates. gRPC means API changes stand a good chance of getting caught by build systems. That seems about as reasonable a definition of "type safe across systems" as can be expected.
- computerex 9y agoCouldn't have put it better myself.
- cle 9y agoI agree completely which is why I love proto.