On: gRPC on Node.js with Buf and TypeScript

[mothershipper]

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.

[nevi-me → mothershipper]

We built a 3-language system where we used grpc-web with Angular, a Go service, a few JVM services, and 2 experimental Rust services; with grpc.

I'd suggest investing in the time to get the compilation tooling fine on the TS side, then the process tends to be smooth enough.