[sudorandom]

Author here: Sorry that I was so harsh on textproto. You are right that it has some strengths over JSON... I'm actually a fan of JSONC for this reason. It does limit you on tooling... but so does textproto, right?

I think the bigger thing that I'm worried about is that gRPC has so many mandatory features that it can become hard to make a good implementation in new languages. To be honest there are some languages where the gRPC implementation is just not great and I blame the feature bloat... and I think textproto was a good demonstration of that feature bloat to me.

[jakjak123]

Yeah, the feature bloat makes it a hurdle to make some good quality implementations. I mostly stayed in Java for years. They are quite good. grpc-web is ok I guess, protobuf-ts are great, swift came along as nice, then I have always been saddened by how awful they are in Go. You will get terrible enums, terrible one-ofs, the interceptors and service registration are very awkward.