Announcing gRPC-Rust

[Doug Fawley]

The gRPC team is happy to announce that we have begun work on a full-featured, native Rust implementation of gRPC in conjunction with the owner of tonic, Lucio Franco.  Tonic already provides a capable and easy-to-use Rust implementation of gRPC, and we intend to build upon this foundation to provide many advanced features already available in other languages, including connection management, client-side load balancing, and xDS support for Proxyless Service Mesh integration.

We are actively looking for people who are interested in using gRPC with Rust and who would be willing to be early adopters and provide feedback during development.  Please fill out the following form so we can reach out to you when more information is available:

http://bit.ly/gRPC-Rust-Interest

We are currently in the early stages of design.  More details will be shared as they become available.

Thank you!

[Daz Wilkin]

This is good news!

I use tonic (and prost) after trying other Rust gRPC implementations and like it a lot.

I'm curious as to what it means for Google (gRPC team) to contribute (!?) to tonic and why this is necessary.

Presumably it results from Google's own increased adoption of Rust. Hopefully, it will lead to Google Cloud providing Cloud Client libraries in Rust too ;-)

Small gripe: that you are only soliciting adopters who are corporate developers (with a "company" and a "role/title")

[Amelia]

I'm very excited for this! Is the idea to replace tonic? Fork it? Will you be working together with the protobuf team as they implement native rust support (https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/tree/main/rust)? Will the official gRPC implementation include support for common ecosystem packages like tower?

I don't expect that you have the answers to all or any of those yet, but I would be very interested in hearing the answers once you do know!

[Doug Fawley]

On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 8:55 PM Daz Wilkin <daz.w...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm curious as to what it means for Google (gRPC team) to contribute (!?) to tonic and why this is necessary.

gRPC is a CNCF project.  Google significantly funds it, but it is OSS-first.  Tonic is a different OSS project which is more independent.  The plan is to contribute a new channel and server implementation into the tonic repo, utilizing tonic's "generic" gRPC implementation, and also to move tonic to the gRPC organization on github (probably with the repo name "grpc-rust").  We will be using the "grpc" crates.io name which the previous owner Stepan Koltsov was gracious enough to donate to the project as well.

Presumably it results from Google's own increased adoption of Rust. Hopefully, it will lead to Google Cloud providing Cloud Client libraries in Rust too ;-)

We certainly hope so too!  :)

 

Small gripe: that you are only soliciting adopters who are corporate developers (with a "company" and a "role/title")

That was not our intent.  Feel free to enter anything into these fields that you feel is appropriate.  (E.g. "independent" and "developer".)

On Wed, Apr 17, 2024 at 2:59 PM Amelia <ame...@tortie.io> wrote:

I'm very excited for this! Is the idea to replace tonic? Fork it? Will you be working together with the protobuf team as they implement native rust support (https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/tree/main/rust)? Will the official gRPC implementation include support for common ecosystem packages like tower?

As mentioned above, the goal is ultimately to replace the channel and server parts, since there are some API changes that will be needed in order to bring in the complete gRPC feature set.  We're still very early in design, so it's unclear exactly how all of it will look.  Using tower, specifically, seems to involve some trade-offs and I'm not yet ready to commit either way until I understand them more.

Thanks,

Doug