Announcement: New Custom/Generic Serialization API for gRPC C++ Servers

[Noah Eisen]

Hi gRPC Users,

TL;DR: New API for per-method, generic method handling on the C++ server side.

Overview: Previously, a gRPC C++ server would either be generic, or use proto specific generated code. Mixing the two was possible, but needed a lot of hacking. Now, there is an option to mark a single method as Raw. This signifies to the generated code that the server should handle the method in terms of ByteBuffer, not in terms of the protobuf objects. This can be useful to special case the serialization for critical methods.

More details can be found in these two gRFCs:

• Exposing GrpcProtoBuffer{Reader|Writer}: L25-expose-buffer-reader-writer.md
• C++ Raw API: L26-cpp-raw-codegen-api.md

The implementation (along with example usage in the tests) can be found in:

• Exposing GrpcProtoBuffer{Reader|Writer}: #14541
  
• C++ Raw API: #15771