Earlier rpc impls had a bunch of issues: - It was more common than not that these earlier rpc libs had no async support. And because language support for futur

Earlier rpc impls had a bunch of issues: - It was more common than not that these earlier rpc libs had no async support. And because language support for futures wasn't that hot back then, a ton of apps would come to a network tx and essentially hang until something happened. grpc doesn't have this problem. - No major rpc impl (eg. corba, soap, rmi, etc) had versioning / backwards compatibility support, until grpc. REST & the web won because the most up to date client is distributed to the user at each usage, which solved the versioning issue a different way. Imo, if grpcs works in the browser (see my later comment), then it's essentially better at everything.