Episode 9 – gRPC with Lucio Franco.

A deep dive into the world of asynchronous networking in Rust with Lucio Franco, maintainer of Tonic, Tower, Tokio, and Hyper. We explore the origins and design of gRPC and its Rust implementation, Tonic—how it came to be, what problems it solves, and why it matters. Along the way, Lucio shares insights into open source collaboration, Google’s work on gRPC for Rust, and what the future might hold for the broader async Rust ecosystem.

Learn more:

• https://github.com/hyperium/tonic — Tonic on GitHub
• https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio — Tokio runtime
• https://github.com/tower-rs/tower — Tower library
• https://github.com/tower-rs/tower-grpc — Archived tower-grpc project
• https://grpc.io/ — gRPC official site
• https://github.com/hyperium/tonic/blob/master/examples/helloworld-tutorial.md — Tonic "hello world" tutorial
• https://docs.rs/tonic/latest/tonic/ — Tonic technical documentation
• https://twitter.github.io/finagle/ — Finagle
• https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2 — linkerd2

Rama

If you like this podcast you might also like our modular network framework in Rust: https://ramaproxy.org

Chapters

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:45 Introduction to Lucio
• 06:50 Lucio's Journey in Rust and Open Source
• 14:45 Future of tower
• 29:48 Exploring gRPC: Concepts and Features
• 36:33 gRPC vs HTTP: A Comparative Analysis
• 43:38 The Role of Proxies in gRPC Communication
• 54:12 Integrating Tonic with Other Stacks
• 59:15 Collaboration with Google on Tonic
• 01:07:03 Getting Started with Tonic and gRPC
• 01:09:48 Tonic Ecosystem: Recommended Crates
• 01:14:19 The Naming of Tonic
• 01:16:38 gRPC Web: Bridging the Browser Gap
• 01:23:16 Proxying gRPC Data: Considerations and Challenges
• 01:27:08 Outro

Netstack.FM

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Music for this episode was composed by Dj Mailbox. Listen to his music at https://on.soundcloud.com/4MRyPSNj8FZoVGpytj.