What are the advantages of gRPC over REST?
Answer
gRPC advantages over REST: (1) Performance — Protobuf binary serialization is significantly faster and produces smaller payloads than JSON; HTTP/2 multiplexing eliminates connection overhead; (2) Type safety — strict .proto contracts with code generation catch type mismatches at compile time; REST JSON is untyped by default; (3) Bidirectional streaming — native support for all streaming patterns; REST only supports one-shot request-response; (4) Code generation — client and server stubs are auto-generated in 11+ languages; (5) Deadline/timeout propagation — deadlines automatically cancel the entire RPC chain; (6) Built-in features — authentication, load balancing, health checking, reflection are part of the framework; (7) Strong backward compatibility story — Protobuf field numbering rules enable safe schema evolution. Disadvantages: not human-readable, requires gRPC-Web for browsers, steeper learning curve.