gRPC-Core Release 1.54.0

[stanle...@google.com]

This is the 1.54.0 (gracious) release announcement for gRPC-Core and the wrapped languages C++, C#, Objective-C, Python, PHP and Ruby. Latest release notes are here.

This release contains refinements, improvements, and bug fixes, with highlights listed below.

Core

• Per Foundational C++ Support, gRPC dropped Visual Studio 2017 support, the minimum version of Visual Studio that gRPC supports is 2019.
• XDS: enable XDS federation by default. (#32711)
• [EventEngine] Add EventEngine::*Handle equality operators. (#32695)
• TlsCreds: Support revocation of intermediate in chain. (#32544)
• [config] Move global config alongside core configuration. (#30788)
• feat: Auth lib: Remove 3PI config url validation. (#32450)

C++

• Upgrade abseil to 20230125.2. (#32733)
• Update minimum MSVC version to 2019. (#32614)
• [GcpObservability C++] Backport: De-experimentalize API (#32715). (#32813)
  • The GCP Observability API provides users with a simple way to export logging, tracing, and metrics to Google Cloud Operations. For more information, please see this blog post.
• OpenCensus: Fix round_trip time. (#32694)
• Update OpenCensus to HEAD (5501a1a). (#32687)
• OpenCensus: Add annotations for messages. (#32646)

PHP

• Use correct namespace for checking if the isDefaultRootsPemSet method exists. (#31580)

Python

• Fix DeprecationWarning when calling asyncio.get_event_loop(). (#32533)
• Remove references to deprecated syntax field. (#32497)