Google has announced the 1.0 release of gRPC Kotlin, following its open sourcing last year. gRPC is a high-performance, open-source, universal RPC framework originally developed at Google to help developers connect services.

Kotlin is the open source language originated by JetBrains and promoted by Google as a first class language for Android to replace or supplement Java. It makes Android programming easier by reducing the need for long chunks of boilerplate code gRPC builds on protocol buffers that provide language-agnostic and high performance data interchange, and adds the network protocol for efficiently communicating with the buffers.

The developer team at Google says an increasing number of developers are using Kotlin to take advantage of its expressiveness, safety, and excellent support for writing asynchronous code with co-routines. They comment:

"Since everything in Google runs on top of gRPC, we needed an idiomatic way to do gRPC with Kotlin."

Having built gRPC Kotlin for internal use, Google made it open source in April 2020. Since then over 30,000 people have downloaded it. That initial release has been improved with bug fixes, better documentation, and improvements.

gRPC Kotlin how comes with a gRPC lite mode that the developers say is

"a great fit for GraalVM Native Image which turns JVM-based applications into ahead-of-time compiled native images, i.e. they run without a JVM. These applications can be smaller, use less memory, and start much faster so they are a good fit for auto-scaling and Command Line Interface environments."

The new release can also be used to create backend services to be packaged for deployment in Kubernete or Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a cloud service that runs docker containers and scales automatically based on demand.  

To know more about Kotlin, see Programmers Guide To Kotlin by Mike James, a title in the I Programmer Library from  I/O Press.

More Information

Kotlin Home Page

gRPC Kotlin On GitHub

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