alt Hacker NewsYou can trivially make breaking changes in a JSON blob too. GRPC has well documented ways to make non-breaking changes. If you're working somewhere where breaking schema changes go in with little fanfare and much debugging then I'm not sure JSON will save you.
The only way to know is to dig through CLs? Write a test.
There's also automated tooling to compare protobuff schemas for breaking changes.
JSON contains a description of the structure of the data that is readable by both machines and humans. JSON can certainly go wrong but it’s much simpler to see when it has because of this. GRPC is usually a binary black box that adds loads of developer time to upskill, debug, figure out error cases and introduces whole new classes of potential bugs.
If you are building something that needs binary performance that GRPC provides, go for it, but pretending there is no extra cost over doing the obvious thing is not true.