Products · Product
gRPC
Raised as a usability problem by 27 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2015–2025), in 21 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Binary traffic is hard to inspect and can't be called from webUnreviewed
20152026- Tooling so bad that gRPC with Bazel and Python is nearly impossible to work with2024-06-27
- Canonical gRPC implementation is painful to access and has bad user experience2024-06-27
- Tying gRPC to HTTP/2 makes simple unary calls slightly harder to use2024-05-17
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 27 complaints
- Hard to debug failures and tune many poorly named timeout and retry settings2025-01-23
- Basic conversions like timestamps are poorly documented and not obvious to figure out2025-01-23
- Code generation fails with cryptic import and annotation problems, taking hours to get working2025-01-23
- Binary-encoded messages are hard to inspect and debug without special tools2024-11-20
- Everything is custom and different from expected HTTP conventions, making it frustrating to use2024-09-03
- Go gRPC enums, one-ofs, interceptors and service registration are awkward to use2024-06-27
- Protobuf has footguns and grows increasingly annoying over time2024-06-27
- Tooling so bad that gRPC with Bazel and Python is nearly impossible to work with2024-06-27
- Canonical gRPC implementation is painful to access and has bad user experience2024-06-27
- Inconsistent libraries across languages and lacking docs made a small message change take a day2024-06-04
- Tying gRPC to HTTP/2 makes simple unary calls slightly harder to use2024-05-17
- Debugging gRPC issues is infuriating for the commenter2023-11-24
- GRPC libraries in Java and Go are frustrating to use in practice, especially for performance-sensitive work2023-04-29
- GRPC needs more tooling, binary traffic is hard to inspect, and it can't be called from the web directly2023-03-03
- Can't select a proto directory via file picker or typed path2022-11-07
- Generated clients force callers to conform to a streaming model instead of returning plain objects2022-08-08
- Binary protocol means developers can't inspect requests in dev tools to see what failed2022-01-19
- Documentation is awful, hard to use2021-06-13
- Completion queue approach is very hard to use compared to Stubby's async model2021-05-14
- Keepalive pings too frequent cause server to silently close connection, hard to configure correctly2021-03-17
- GRPC's protobuf-to-JSON conversion has many quirks and makes changing enums in downstream systems hard2020-07-15
- Generating stubs requires a separate, language-by-language setup and plugin install for each language2019-05-27
- Developers find gRPC complex and wish the stack were simpler to work with2018-12-15
- Overly complicated and badly documented, hard to use with Python multiprocessing or asyncio2018-11-06
- Tooling is half-baked and practically unusable outside Google's internal parts2018-01-20
- Building all of OpenSSL makes getting started slow; can't easily build only static libraries2015-12-12
- Auth guide mixes many languages, so it is confusing to read2015-12-03