My experience with grpc was not good. I was writing some python code to interface with etcd. At least at the time there wasn't a library compatible with etcd 3

My experience with grpc was not good. I was writing some python code to interface with etcd. At least at the time there wasn't a library compatible with etcd 3 that met my needs, and I only needed to call a couple of methods, so I figured I'd just use grpc directly, no big deal right? So I copied the proto files from the etcd project to mine, then tried to figure out how to use protoc to generate python client code. The documentation was a little lackluster, especially on how to generate annotations for use with mypy or pyright, but whatever, it wasn't too hard to figure out the right incantation. Except it didn't work. The etcd proto files had some annotations or includes or something that worked fine with the golang implementation, but didn't work with the Python implementation. I thought the proto files were supposed to be language agnostic. Well after a couple hours of trying to get the files working as is, I gave up and just modified the proto files. I deleted most of it, except for the types and methods I actually needed, got rid of some annotations, and I think I ended up needing to add some python specific annotations as well. Then I finally got some python code, and a separate file for type annotations. But I still have issues. Eventually, I figured out that what was happening was that the package hierarchy of the proto files, and imports in those files has to match the python package names, and it uses absolute, rather than relative, imports. Ok, so surely there is an option to pass to protoc to add a prefix package to that, so I can use thes files under my own namespace right? Nope. Alright, I guess I have to update these protoc files again. It'll be a pain if I ever need to update these to match changes upstream. Ok, now the code is finally working, let's make sure the types check. No. MyPy gives me errors. In the generated code. At first I assume I did something wrong, but after much investigation, I determine that protoc just generates type annotations that are not just wrong, but invalid. It annotates global variables as class variables, which MyPy, rightly, complains doesn't make sense. To fix this I resort to some hackery that I saw another python project use to fix the import issue I mentioned earlier: I use sed to fix the pyi file. Is it hacky? Yes, but at this point, I don't care. I assume that other people have had a better experience, given its popularity, but I can't say I would be happy to use it again.