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If you were at a shop that used grpc a lot, would you not have tools ready to go that can turns the protobuf back into text? I've often thought how odd it is t
by gameswithgo 6y ago
If you were at a shop that used grpc a lot, would you not have tools ready to go that can turns the protobuf back into text?
I've often thought how odd it is that the world is spending time and energy parsing things into text formats and back, when its just two computers communicating...making more work for themselves and the entire internet backbone....just because we can't be bothered to use a simple tool when debugging over the wire.
- ChymeraXYZ 6y agoIf on-the-wire readability is important you can always opt for a different marshaling method, like JSON (or even roll your own). Yes it's some extra work but not a showstopper if that's the only downside of gRPC/Protobufs.
- psanford 6y agoWireshark has supported gRPC for years. Its really not any harder than looking at HTTP2 traffic.
- kortex 6y agoThat is exactly what we do. You can write a python tool in like a dozen lines to cast to and from. There is also a way to use one of the built in protobuf tools to do it but you also have to point at the proto files yourself. I think there are other advantages to text protocols besides debugging on the wire, namely ease of composing tools. Streams of text is extremely versatile and economic for many workflows. Of course you lose that ease once you start embedding binary data.
- jahewson 6y agoEven with binary data we spend our time flipping the bytes to network order.