gRPC-Rust Roadmap
With the release of our client-side preview done, I’d like to spend some time talking about what you can expect to see next from the gRPC-Rust team.
In progress
The biggest and most important thing under active development is the server API. This will be a natural extension of the client API, sharing types where possible. Expect to see another preview announcement when it’s ready!
In addition, we’re already hard at work on several more client-side features like integrated health checking and message compression.
Finally, we’re working to bulk up our testing and implement the full gRPC Interop test suite so that gRPC-Rust can be declared production-worthy.
Next up
Looking even further ahead, there are many other features and changes that are planned:
Significant gRPC features: Retries, Binary Logging, Channelz Debugging, Keepalive support, Authz, etc. These features will be released as they become available.
Full xDS (Envoy) support is a longer-term goal the team will be heavily focused on for the next several months. In addition to Proxyless Service Mesh (PSM) use cases, this feature enables direct connectivity for Google Cloud services.
gRPC Status -> Abseil Status: the gRPC status type in C++ is very similar to
absl::Status, and not by accident – but their minor internal differences have caused some pain. Instead of using our own status type, we intend to standardize on a shared Rust RPC status type. We’re eagerly awaiting the stabilization of the Try trait, which will allow this new type to ergonomically provide some very useful features. More details on that change will be released when they are available.Performance tuning: while we are initially focusing on “getting things done”, we will also be looking at how we can improve performance over what the preview offers. We’ll be looking at reducing memory usage (overall and per connection), zero-copy support, and a lower-level HTTP/2 implementation, resulting in higher throughput, lower latency, and more parallelism.
Join us at gRPConf 2026!
If you’re interested in meeting the gRPC team, discussing related topics with others in the industry, or maybe even sharing your own experiences or advice in a talk, please mark your calendar for Thursday, September 3rd, when we’ll be holding this year’s gRPC developer’s conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
- Event Site: gRPConf
- CFP is open: Submit your talk!