Using gRPC for (local) inter-process communication (2021)

There's a mountain of grpc-centric python code at $dayjob and it's been miserable to live with. Maybe it's less awful in c/c++, or at least confers some decent performance there. In python it's hot garbage.

C++ generated code from protobuf/grpc is pretty awful in my experience.

Do you need to look at that generated code though? I haven't used gRPC yet (some poor historical decisions mean I can't use it in my production code so I'm not in a hurry - architecture is rethinking those decisions in hopes that we can start using it so ask me in 5 years what I think). My experience with other generated code is that it is not readable but you never read it so who cares - instead you just trust the interface which is easy enough (or is terrible and not fixable)

I meant the interfaces are horrible. As you said, as long as it has a good interface and good performance, I wouldn't mind.

For example, here's the official tutorial for using the async callback interfaces in gRPC: https://grpc.io/docs/languages/cpp/callback/

It encourages you to write code with practices that are quite universally considered bad in modern C++ due to a very high chance of introducing memory bugs, such as allocating objects with new and expecting them to clean themselves up via delete this;. Idiomatic modern C++ would be using smart pointers, or go a completely different route with co-routines and no heap-allocated objects.