Using gRPC with Go

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

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In the past few articles, we’ve used Go’s net/rpc library to build a simple file metadata server. In this article, we’re going to look at using gRPC (https://grpc.io) to fulfill the same purpose.

gRPC has many advantages over the built-in RPC library, namely:

Fast and efficient network communication
Ability to stream inputs and outputs
Automatic transport encryption
Ability to interact with other languages
Ready extensions to support authentication and connection handling.

gRPC is typically boiled down to the description “Protobuf messages over HTTP/2.” This is true to a first pass, but it also encompasses the libraries, middleware extensions, and interactions with other languages.

For the sake of brevity, some sections of the code examples here are left out. The full code for this example can be found at https://github.com/cmceniry/login-grpcls.

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