What are the trade-offs between REST and gRPC for internal Go microservices?
REST is human-readable and universally supported. gRPC offers binary encoding, strongly typed contracts, bidirectional streaming, and generated clients — making it superior for internal high-throughput service communication.
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Human-readable JSON — easy to debug with curl and browser dev tools
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Universal client support — any language, any HTTP client
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Cacheable with HTTP semantics (GET, ETags, Cache-Control)
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Easier to expose as a public API — developers understand it
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No code generation required
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Protocol Buffers: binary encoding is 3-10x smaller and faster to encode/decode than JSON
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Strongly typed contracts: .proto files are the source of truth, generated client/server code
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Bidirectional streaming: server streaming, client streaming, and full-duplex streams
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Deadlines propagated across calls automatically via context
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Built-in load balancing, health checking, and flow control