# gRPC

25 Hacker News commenters recommended gRPC and 24 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for typed service interfaces, generated clients and strong backend use across many languages; critics say it is heavy and poorly suited to browsers and plain HTTP.

## Why people recommend it

- Typed interfaces and generated clients (3 comments): "it already gives you a language for describing interfaces and support for generating client types from it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47821709)) "if you just want a nicely typed interface for your APIs, in my experience gRPC is much more useful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287838)) "OpenAPI, Thrift and protobuf/gRPC are all far better schema languages." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46270306))
- Strong backend and pragmatic choice (3 comments): "gRPC which is insanely good for backend but maybe too demanding for web" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46270292)) "gRPC is excellent and local first software can absolutely use it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707737)) "it wins in the "pragmatic" department" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46125133))
- Top-notch platform and language support (2 comments): "The gRPC platform support is top notch and seamless" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690989)) "C# gRPC story is really, really good, too." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49719838))
- Handles backwards compatibility well (2 comments): "Protobuf in conjunction with gRPC can play wisely with the backwards compatibility feature" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112539)) "gRPC forces you to confront them early and explicitly IMO, which is not a bad thing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46769050))

## What people warn about

- Heavy and weak in browsers (2 comments): "But it would make it heavier and less browser-compatible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49899190)) "gRPC which is insanely good for backend but maybe too demanding for web" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46270292))
- Awkward with Kubernetes and existing stacks (2 comments): "My gripe with grpc is that it doesn’t play super well with kubernetes services" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012293)) "it's still a nightmare trying to integrate with gRPC from something remotely modern" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329265))
- Misses plain HTTP features like resumable uploads (2 comments): "I understand some of the appeal of grpc, but resumable uploads and download offsets have long be part of plain http." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766145)) "Splitting the response into blocks and having the client request the next block, as in the gRPC solution, causes round-trip delays." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46767870))
- Bloated dependencies and messy ecosystem (2 comments): "gRPC ecosystem is also not very uniform despite its popularity, comes with bloat, is a bit of a mess in Python." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733852)) "there were like dozens of abseil .so's in the list IIRC. I don't like it!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48531324))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [ConnectRPC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/connectrpc.md): 15 recommend
- [tRPC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/trpc.md): 12 recommend
- [Apache Thrift](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-thrift.md): 8 recommend
- [Varlink](https://hackerapproved.com/p/varlink.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "gRPC", https://hackerapproved.com/p/grpc/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).