netstack.fm gRPC with Lucio Franco
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Oct 14, 2025 Lucio Franco, a senior software engineer and creator of Tonic, dives into the world of async networking in Rust. He discusses the origins of gRPC and its Rust implementation, addressing its advantages over REST and the significance of HTTP/2 for efficiency. Lucio shares insights on the design challenges faced while developing Tonic, the open-source collaboration with Google, and how Tonic integrates with various runtimes. He also highlights practical tips for getting started with Tonic, making this a must-listen for Rust enthusiasts!
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How Tonic Was Born
- Lucio built Tonic to be async-await-first after seeing async-await land and wanting better ergonomics than Tower GRPC.
- He released Tonic in Sept 2019 and that project helped him join AWS Lambda and continue working on it part-time.
Why Tower's Evolution Is Hard
- Tower grew from Linkerd/Finagle needs and faces tough choices because it abstracts complex behaviors.
- Moving Tower forward needs sustained funding, consensus, and Rust compiler capabilities.
gRPC Is Codegen Plus Transport
- gRPC pairs code generation with an HTTP/2 transport to give language-agnostic RPCs and streaming semantics.
- The transport/channel side carries most complexity like retries, load balancing, and stream management.