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I'm looking at something similar with Go as the backend. Why gRPC instead of a pipe? I started with that as well since it was really easy to set up but that comes with the caveat of requiring network permissions even though it's local to local communication.

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Pros and cons: with a pipe it will be up to you to create your own message delimiters and protocol, so a pipe is somewhat lower level. You also limit comm. to just that machine, but that may be a pro if that is what you are looking for (omits need for things like username/password or locking to 'localhost'). Lastly, you do not gain an API for your users to consume (if that makes sense for your app - it doesn't always).

Protoc actually generates "writeDelimitedMessage" and "readDelimitedMessage" functions for each type. The only thing I needed to add was some buffering on the Dart side to ensure the full message was available. The Go side was able to read the stream and block until input became available

Interesting - so you are using protobuffer encoding over a named pipe?

Yes but just over stdin/stdout since I'm creating the backend as a subprocess. Not sure if it makes more sense to have the backend be the parent and the flutter app be the subprocess but this is working so far.

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