Comment by shereadsthenews

A couple of subtly wrong points in the article. Firstly gRPC payload can be anything, needs not be an encoded protocol buffer. Secondly there’s not a whole lot of “validation” going on in the protobuf codec. Basically any fundamentally correct buffer encoded as message A will decode successfully as message B for any B. If there are unknown fields they are silently consumed. If there are missing fields they are given the default values and there is no “required” in proto3. So there is significantly less safety, and significantly more flexibility, in gRPC than people generally realize.