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Hmm, the main weakness of Cap'n Proto is that you have to already know so much stuff in order to understand why it makes all the great decisions it does. The we
by doctorpangloss 3y ago
Hmm, the main weakness of Cap'n Proto is that you have to already know so much stuff in order to understand why it makes all the great decisions it does. The weakness you're talking about matters to me, sure, I don't use Cap'n'Proto because it lacks the same tooling as gRPC, but it is better than gRPC from an ideas point of view.
I am not going to write those language implementations, I have other stuff I need to do, and gRPC is good enough. But the people who love writing language implementations might not understand why Cap'n Proto is great, or at least not understand as well as they understand Golang and Rust, so they will rewrite X in Golang and Rust instead.
Anyway, the great ideas haven't changed in whatever it is, almost 10-15 years you've been working on this, they've been right all along. So it is really about communication.
A comment on HN that really stuck with me was like: "Man dude, this is great, but try to explain to my team that it's Not React. They won't care."
I'm just a guy, I don't know how to distill how good Cap'n Proto is. But "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks" is the prototype. What is the unreasonable effectiveness of Cap'n Proto? In games, which I'm familiar with, entity component systems, user generated content and their tooling have a lot in common with Cap'n Proto. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of ECS" is deterministic multiplayer, but that is also really poorly communicated, and thus limits adoption. Maybe you are already facing the same obstacles with Cloudflare Workers. It's all very communications related and I hope you get more adoption.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoYeah, this has been the struggle with Sandstorm and self-hosting too. Ten years on, I'm still confident it's the best way to self-host, but to convince someone of that I have to sit them down and figure out how to get them to understand capability-based security, and most people lose interest about... immediately. :P I suspect a lot of things will eventually look more like Cap'n Proto and Sandstorm, but it will take a lot of time for everyone else to get there.
- pbronez 3y agoI’m sold on Sandstorm, but the company folded before I could do anything with it. If someone makes another push at it, I have a lot of security-focused enterprise folks who want more robust & streamlined ways to self host stuff.
- ocdtrekkie 3y agoI have been pretty invested into Sandstorm for like ten years now, so I am very interested in getting that new push moving. If you know people interested in contributing to the project in any way, we are definitely interested in looking at ways to make it happen. We will probably put out a blog post sometime soon with an update.