Earlier quoted context omitted.
No disrespect intended, but I find this comment pretty funny. SOAP/XML has been exactly this for 20 years. It definitely has some major warts, but gRPC isn’t doing anything new.
And CORBA/IDL was doing exactly the same 20 years prior to that. We get tired of things because they accumulate cruft, or are deemed "ugly" by younger developers. So we replace them with newer alternatives, that are more light and easy to reason about for newbies entering the profession. But then we eventually find that we needed more features after all, so we gradually re-implement them again until the cycle repeats…
In all seriousness grpc and protobuf isn't bad. Not sure if I'm sold on the http2 transport - but at least it has somewhat reasonable support for crypto.
I was bummed waiting for for the actual rpc-part to become usable - and now I think I'd rather build on capt'n'proto. But really, if we can just get some standardization that's better than json/soap, I'm willing to have another look.
If I never have to base64-encode an image or other binary to fit it into an api request, it'll be too soon. Or invalid deserislization error.