What Are RPCs in Golang?

An overview of remote procedure calls in Go

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What Is an RPC?

A Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a subroutine in distributed computing. The remote implementation of RPC is similar to local calls but usually not identical. RPC usually requires that the object name, function name, or parameter are passed to remote servers, and the servers then return the processed result(s) back to client-side (request-response). RPC can be communicated through TCP, UDP, or HTTP protocols.

There are three types of implementation in Golang, namely:

• net/rpc
• net/rpc/jsonrpc
• gRPC

net/rpc

The Golang official documentation uses encoding/gob in the net/rpc package as encoding or decoding methods, supporting TCP or HTTP protocols. However, because gob encoding is only used in Golang, it only supports servers and client-side interactions written in Golang.

Example of server-side net/rpc:

package main
import (
   "fmt"
   "log"
   "net"
   "net/rpc"
)
type Listener int

type Reply struct {
   Data string
}
func (l *Listener) GetLine(line []byte, reply *Reply) error {
   rv := string(line)
   fmt.Printf("Receive: %v\n", rv)
   *reply = Reply{rv}
   return nil
}
func main() {
   addy, err := net.ResolveTCPAddr("tcp", "0.0.0.0:12345")
   if err != nil {
     log.Fatal(err)
   }
   inbound, err := net.ListenTCP("tcp", addy)
   if err != nil {
     log.Fatal(err)