protobuf-ts

DX for front or back end? The beauty of tRPC is that the types are derived/inferred from the backend runtime code (like, as you type). It would be nigh impossible to do that with grpc(-web) using proto files as the source of truth. It's possible there's a project out there which could automatically produce proto files from something like zod, json-schema, etc. which could be directly interpreted by TS to provide similar (as you type) DX while still allowing some other language backend to consume the derived proto files (though the DX there would be less than ideal). If you're just looking for similar TS clients/interfaces for grpc-web then I'd recommend https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts which operates on plain JS objects (no new MyMessage().serialize(), instead the code generator mostly produces TS interfaces for you to work agains

Personally, I find gRPC-Web very attractive but the current state of TypeScript/JS code-gen is very confusing and lacking. I would love something like https://orval.dev for gRPC-web. Have I missed something or is it just early to expect it? I tried a few libraries but couldn't get them to work or would generate unappealing results. I believe I'm hitting this issue with my local experiments. https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web/issues/535 UPDATE: I was able to get something working with these from a ReactJS app! Server: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/grpc/grpcweb Client TS Gen: https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts

https://github.com/bufbuild/protobuf-es/blob/main/docs/gener... And there's also this which is by the same author but came before it: https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts The latter has code-generation for services and has various transport packages for twirp, grpc, and grpc-web.

This looks very interesting! Anything that can move people away from protobuf.js (which seems to no longer be maintained and depends on prototype values for "default values" meaning that you can't send deserialized protobuf messages to/from web workers) and the "native" JS codegen by Google (which produces code that is both very slow and a awkward to use) is a win in my book. We're currently using https://github.com/timostamm/protobuf-ts which has been fantastic. Its codegen is dependent on the protoc binary as it is implemented as a protoc plugin, but the code it generates passes the protobuf conformance tests. The generated code also outputs plain objects when deserializing protobuf messages which means it works perfectly when sending stuff to/from web workers. It also has grpc, grpc-web, and twirp clients.