Streaming

The closest siblings to gRPC are Thrift, an Apache project, and Twirp, open sourced by Twitch. But neither of these include support for streaming. gRPC, on the other hand, was designed with streaming in mind from the outset.

Streaming allows a request or response to have an arbitrarily large size, such as operations that require uploading or downloading a huge amount of information. Most RPC systems require that the arguments of an RPC be represented as data structures in memory that are then serialized to bytes and sent on the network. When a very large amount of data must be exchanged, this can mean significant memory pressure on both the client process and the server process. And it means that operations must typically impose hard limits on the size of request and response messages, to prevent resource exhaustion. Streaming alleviates this by allowing the request or response to be an arbitrarily long sequence of messages. The cumulative total size of a request or response...