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Comment by necubi | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare is almost entirely run on Cap'n Proto, including the entire workers platform

The Workers platform uses Cap'n Proto extensively, as one might expect (with me being the author of Cap'n Proto and the lead dev on Workers). Some other parts of Cloudflare use it (including the logging pipeline, which used it before I even joined), but there are also many services using gRPC or just JSON. Each team makes their own decisions.

I have it on my TODO list to write a blog post about Workers' use of Cap'n Proto. By far the biggest wins for us are from the RPC system -- the serialization honestly doesn't matter so much.

That said, the ecosystem around Cap'n Proto is obviously lacking compared to protobuf. For the Cloudflare Workers Runtime team specifically, the fact that we own it and can make any changes we need to balances this out. But I'm hesitant to recommend it to people at other companies, unless you are eager to jump into the source code whenever there's a problem.

A while ago I talked to some team that was planning a migration to GraphQL, long after this was generally thought to be a bad idea. The lead seemed really attached to the "composable RPCs" aspect of the thing, and at the time it seemed like nothing else offered this. It would be quite cool if capnproto became a more credible option for this sort of situation. At the time users could read about the rpc composition/promise passing/"negative latency" stuff, but it was not quite implemented.

Thank you for posting here. Always insightful, always a treat.

This makes me really sad. Protobufs are not all that great, but they were there first and “good enough”.

It’s frustrating when we can’t have nice things because a mediocre Google product has sucked all the air out of the room. I’m not only talking about Protobufs here either.

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