gRPC in D good idea for GSOC 2018?

[Andrew Benton]

On Monday, 22 January 2018 at 05:54:31 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
wrote:
> On Monday, 22 January 2018 at 04:40:53 UTC, Andrew Benton wrote:
>> On Monday, 15 January 2018 at 19:28:08 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>>> I know a project where D could benefit from gRPC in D, which 
>>> is not among the supported languages:
>>>
>>>   https://grpc.io/docs/
>>>
>>> Do you think gRPC support is worth adding to GSOC 2018 ideas?
>>>
>>>   https://wiki.dlang.org/GSOC_2018_Ideas
>>>
>>> Ali
>>
>> An http/2 and gRPC solutions is probably necessary with tools 
>> like linkerd, envoy, and istio if D wants to be competitive in 
>> service mesh and distributed applications.
>>
>> http/2 and/or gRPC are both excellent ideas for GSoC 2018.
>
> I would consider them awful in a sense that there is no 
> foundation to build them on. At best it will be a self-serving 
> artifact poorly fitting with anything else.

I think it would likely be built on top of vibe or collie instead 
of being standalone, but I see your point.

> There is not even a standard way on handling IO as of yet.
> Basically do we want fiber-aware IO or blocking IO or explicit 
> async with future/promise?

You're right.  It's definitely a problem.  Given ease of use and 
the learning curve, I'd be in favor of fiber-aware IO or 
async/await types.

> Do we even have protobuf package?

We have at least two.  dproto is a package that supports proto2.  
I've used it before and it's really nice.  There's also the 
eponymous protobuf package, which integrates with protoc and can 
also do proto3.  I haven't used it yet.