Really excited about this. I didn't like how opaque and heavy gRPC is. Also I really wanted support for JSON. Mostly for these reasons, RCP hasn't been implemented in my architecture yet (Just using standard REST)

Twirp is everything I wanted in an RPC framework and I'm looking forward to implementing it ASAP. Thanks Twitch team :)

Can I ask why you want JSON with gRPC? The benefits to protobuf are tremendous, with little to no downsides

One reason is to be able to call gRPC service from a web browser. Native JSON support makes that much easier.

There has recently been a lot of work for native grpc client in the browser. It’s not fully there yet but is looking real promising!

https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web

Also grpc web is coming along

https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web