The protobuf/grpc ecosystem in nodejs in a catastrophic state compared to other languages. Half of our stack is in go using grpc, but the other half is nodejs. We tried protoc-js/protobufjs neither of them works with even a slightly more complicated setup. A simple import sometimes can cause invalid code, or just simply breaks the build. The best solution is now to use stephenh/ts-proto which works great, except the lack of grpc and json_name (which is must because we often use json for node services) support.
We have a two services in production that use node/grpc, both as clients and as servers and have seen very few issues. We have seen some library issues related to old versions of the now "legacy" protobuf implementation, but my understanding is that is being replaced with this implementation: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-node/tree/master/packages/proto...
So much this. At a previous company (Go/Python/Ruby), we used gRPC almost exclusively, and the experience was pretty good.
We're just now hitting a growth point where we need stronger contracts between our services and unfortunately really can't recommend gRPC as the primary language used is TypeScript.
We've spiked on our own protoc plugin (based on protoc-gen-star) and runtime lib (extending the google libs), but it's slow going and more likely to become tech debt than picking something off the shelf like open-api.
> protoc-js/protobufjs neither of them works with even a slightly more complicated setup
Feel this quite a bit. Annotations completely blow up protobufjs for some reason, no idea why and no desire to fix upstream. Very unfortunately bad user experience.
In my case the client lib works ok, but the server part is is not good (both ends nodejs/grpc/proto). I kept back the server part on older node version (13.3) to avoid issues.
Also I had issues with pm2 with the server part.
i wish GRPC had a better escape hatch, so if my language doesn't support it or I only need one endpoint, I can just consume a GRPC service via a regular REST HTTP request.
I don't think I would recommend the grpc-gateway project for new projects. It's there and it works, but the momentum seems to be behind grpc-web these days, and, personally, I find it a bit easier to get off the ground with it.
It sometimes seems the word “scalable” has completely lost its meaning. This is a basic barebones build process, not a “scalable” build process, whatever that means.
