> Some people in my team had gRPC foisted on them to run on an ARM Cortex class device running a real time OS. It boggled my mind they were even able to get it

> Some people in my team had gRPC foisted on them to run on an ARM Cortex class device running a real time OS. It boggled my mind they were even able to get it to ship. I shipped an embedded project using an RTOS and < 256kB RAM using protocol buffers (even nested ones) and zero-copy deserialization for byte arrays some time ago. We used nanopb, and it worked just fine if you understand how it works - although it certainly is less pleasant to work with than a fuller implementation which would just have copied out the internal bytes into new arrays and not have let us deal with lots of internal pointers into byte arrays. Overall using Protocol Buffers was a great success in that project, since we could share schemas between IoT devices and the backend, and were able to generate a lot of code which would otherwise have been hand-written. > Using something like flatbuffers would have made a lot more sense. It might be able to solve the same problem. But it also needs to answer the questions: Is a suitable library available for all consumers of the data-structure? I don't think this was the case for our use-case, so it wouldn't have made more sense to use it back then.