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I'm new to gRPC and after gathering a bit of knowledge thinking of using it for a production-grade service. There are several customers of the service who are using REST API endpoints of the service to integrate their system with the service. To make the life of the customers easier there is the future plan to make some library in a different language so that they can integrate with the service easily. As the different customers use different languages so it's a bit tough to give support to so many languages.

Will it be a good idea to use the Interoperability feature of gRPC and share the proto file with the customer? Then the customer can generate the gRPC client of their language of interest. Are there any drawbacks to this?

forhadmethun
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To answer the question, yes, you can certainly use the gRPC proto file as an API to share with external customers. I have done that several times and it works pretty well. For our main language that our application is developed in, we included some convenience libraries and examples. I like having those as part of an SDK API documentation package to add a little extra information that may not be captured in the proto file. We stopped trying to provide examples in other language that we were not necessarily proficient in as the target audience seemed to be able to look at our main example and translate accordingly. It also gives them something out of the box to run to verify their development environment is setup properly.

Rob Goodwin
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