Hi Team,
I'm Sacheta, one of the developers working on the labview-grpc <https://github.com/ni/grpc-labview> project. *Little Background:* LabVIEW is a graphical programming environment, primarily used for testing and measurement applications. Since LabVIEW is not officially supported by Google for gRPC, we’ve implemented a custom integration. As part of our efforts to upgrade the gRPC submodule from v1.62.0 to v1.70.0, we encountered a critical crash related to protobuf. *Summary of the Issue:* We use a custom class, LVMessage, which manually inherits from google::protobuf::Message to handle marshalling between LabVIEW data types and protobuf messages. This approach worked fine until we upgraded to gRPC v1.70.0 (protobuf v3.29.0). The method GetClassData() has now been made pure virtual and is expected to return metadata typically generated by protoc. Our initial workaround was to override GetClassData() and return nullptr. However, this results in a crash because the protobuf runtime unconditionally accesses the returned value. On examining protoc-generated code, we realized GetClassData() returns a complex internal structure (ClassData), which is tightly coupled with protoc output and not feasible to recreate manually. We reached out to the Google team (see thread <https://groups.google.com/g/protobuf/c/Ej4RAPkwKsY/m/OgEiNuC4AAAJ>), and they confirmed that manually inheriting from Message or MessageLite is not the intended usage. Instead, they suggested using a custom Codec with gRPC to implement our own serialization/deserialization logic independently. *Why We Avoid protoc:* We intentionally avoid using protoc because it generates platform-specific C++ code. Since LabVIEW is designed to be platform-independent, introducing native binaries would compromise this goal. *Next Steps:* It appears we will need to re-architect our integration and move toward a custom Codec approach. However, if anyone here has: - Knowledge of alternative approaches - Knowledge of implementing a custom Codec in gRPC - Successfully handled a similar use case before —we’d greatly appreciate your guidance or suggestions. Thanks in advance! Sacheta -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "grpc.io" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to grpc-io+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/grpc-io/74f59de5-9320-4694-88e8-2037e8c1d5cbn%40googlegroups.com.
