// the find
tikv/grpc-rs
The gRPC library for Rust built on C Core library and futures
A Rust wrapper around the gRPC C Core library, maintained by TiKV and used in production in TiKV itself. It gives you async gRPC (unary and streaming) over futures, with SSL and client-side load balancing. If you need gRPC in Rust and have a tolerance for C FFI in your dependency tree, this is battle-tested.
Production-hardened by TiKV — this isn't a hobby wrapper, it's been running distributed key-value workloads at scale. Supports both protobuf and prost codecs, which means you're not locked into one serialization stack. The build system generates bindings for x86_64/arm64 Linux at publish time so you don't need LLVM installed in CI for the common case. Client-side load balancing is fully implemented, which is the part most gRPC wrappers get wrong or skip entirely.
It's a C Core wrapper, not a pure Rust implementation — your binary pulls in gRPC Core as a submodule and compiles it, which means a heavy C/C++ build dependency, potential OpenSSL/BoringSSL symbol clashes, and a more complex cross-compilation story than you'd get with tonic. Custom metadata and server-side load reporting are still unimplemented despite being listed since at least 2019. The 'still under development' disclaimer in the README is concerning given the project's age and TiKV's production use of it — it reads like nobody updated the status section. If you're starting a new project and don't have a specific reason to avoid tonic, use tonic instead.