Announcement: Possible breaking change to community-supported platforms on gRPC-core

[AJ Heller]

Hello gRPC community!

I'll be introducing a change (#27513) to gRPC-core which may break the build on some community-supported platforms. This affects all of the languages that rely on gRPC-core, including C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, and PHP.

We've taken great care to ensure that the officially-supported platforms (many versions of Linux, MacOS, Windows), along with some of the platforms with best-effort support (Android and iOS), are covered by our continuous integration test suite. These platforms should continue to build and run happily. The community-supported platforms may or may not continue to build, we don't have the resources to test them all. We continue to rely on external contributions to maintain gRPC on these platforms.

If you use gRPC-core on a community-supported platform, please check out and attempt to build PR #27513. The PR does not introduce any functional changes at this time, so a successful build should be sufficient. Ultimately, we are working towards having libuv drive gRPC's low-level I/O operations. It may be worth testing libuv on your platform as well to ensure core functionality is working.

As currently planned, this change will land in the gRPC master branch the week of Nov 8th-12th, and it will likely be included in the v1.43 release of gRPC in mid-December.

Best regards,

AJ Heller Software Engineer ho...@google.com

[AJ Heller]

Update on the timeline: we now expect to land this change in the master branch in the next few weeks, followed by an official release this coming March or April. As stated above, this change will require libuv to build on all supported platforms, and we've made an effort to ensure all supported platforms will continue to function seamlessly. If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Best regards,

-aj