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Which protocol or open standard do you like or wish was more popular? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/programming@programming.dev
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There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.

The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.

I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.

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[–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The biggest problems with gRPC are:

  1. Very complicated. Way more complexity than you want in most cases.
  2. Depends on HTTP 2. I've seen people who weren't even doing web stuff reach for gRPC, and now boom you have a web server in your stack for now reason. Compare to Thrift which properly separates out encodings, transports, etc.
  3. Doesn't work from the web. There are actually two modifications to gRPC to make it work on the web which means you have three different incompatible versions of gRPC with different feature sets. IIRC some of them require setting up complex proxies, some don't support streaming calls, ugh. Total mess.

Plain HTTP can be type safe. Just publish JSON schema or Typespec files or even use Protobuf.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Your concerns are all valid, but about 1 and 3 there are possible solutions. I'm using Rust+Tonic to build an API and that's eliminate the necessity of proxies and it's very simple to use.

    I know that it don't solve all problems, but IMHO is a question of adoption. Easier told tools will be develop for it.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago*

    Depends on HTTP 2.

    Doesn’t work from the web.

    Am I the only one who is weirded out? Requiring a web server for something and then requiring another server if you want it to actually work on the web?
    How expensive do people want to make their deployments?

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