Julia language implementation

[mkschulze]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

There is interest in building an interface to a popular Graph Database in Julia as a community project (MIT), but the ClientAPI to the DB requires gRPC methods for channel/session/transaction etc., which are not available in Julia.

Describe the solution you'd like

A maintained Julia implementation would allow for all the benefits Julia has to offer like Multiple Dispatch and others and could be used as the connection layer instead of calling into Python for example.

Describe alternatives you've considered

The only alternative I can see would be to either call into Python, or build a minimal gRPC Julia pkg, with just the required methods.

Additional context

There was an approach to build a Julia pkg called gRPC.jl, but the pkg and it's dependencies are abandoned and even removed from the pkg registry.
#Humans-of-Julia/TypeDBClient.jl#20

[markdroth]

Unfortunately, this is not a language in which we have staffing or expertise to support. However, if someone from the Julia community wants to contribute a Julia gRPC API, we can help facilitate the work, clarify requirements, do API reviews, set up interop tests, etc. If that's something you're interested in, please reach out to @a11r.

[mkschulze]

Ok, I'm passing it further into the community, maybe somebody would like to give it a go as it's above my skill level as well.

Thanks, for offering the help!

[mkschulze]

Hello @a11r, we @Humans-of-Julia are considering to implement gRPC in Julia and it would be great to get some guidance from you. What would be the preferred way to get into conversation with you?
We are active on discord here to chat, or via e.mail or better here?

We currently wonder if this would be good approach:

• using Clang.jl to wrap the shared C library
• using LibCURL.jl as a HTTP/2 layer
• using StructTypes.jl to do the serialization
• somehow deal with the low level operations
• maybe extend Protobuf.jl to also generate the StructTypes if possible

What else would be required on top of the core library?
Thanks for getting back to us.

[mkschulze]

@markdroth how could we ideally get in touch with @a11r ? We would like to further discuss things.

[markdroth]

I've sent him a message internally asking him to get back to you.

[mkschulze]

Hi @markdroth & @a11r
we made the following packages work again:
HTTP/2.jl
HPack.jl

That was required for gRPC.jl to work again.
It works now, but we don't know in which state it is yet.
Also, one of our team members has owner permissions to these repos now, and we would like to make this stable and up to date again.

As you offered to help facilitate the work, clarify requirements, do API reviews, set up interop tests, we would be very interested in this.

If you prefer E-Mail, I'm reachable at mks[at]e.mail.de

Thank you!

[A1-Mathematik]

I would be interested in helping implement this. How can I help?

[mkschulze]

I would be interested in helping implement this. How can I help?

There is a working client here: https://github.com/JuliaComputing/gRPCClient.jl

Only a Julia gRPC Server is missing. So, maybe if you are interested to do that, and use the gRPCClient.jl as your client lib, then the implementation would be there.

We used the client to connect to a Java server implementation.