gRPC is great, but Instagram's client apps are web-based (using React now), and ... | Hacker News

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elithrar on March 6, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: Performance and Usage at Instagram

gRPC is great, but Instagram's client apps are web-based (using React now), and consuming protobuf in JavaScript is unlikely to be faster (and definitely not as convenient) vs. JSON.

Given the limited resources of a lot of Android devices, an extra unmarshalling step would offset any wire-size reductions.

krashidov on March 7, 2016 | [–]

Just to clarify, do you mean that all of their mobile apps are on react-native now? Or just their web apps?

jsprogrammer on March 6, 2016 | [–]

Extra unmarshaling? The string will either be parsed as JSON or some other thing.

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