What is gRPC and why use it over REST in Go?

gRPC is a high-performance RPC framework using HTTP/2 and Protocol Buffers, ideal for internal microservice communication.

Unlike REST (which uses text-based JSON over HTTP/1.1), gRPC uses Protobufs (binary serialization). This results in extremely small payloads and fast encoding/decoding. Go has first-class support for gRPC, utilizing HTTP/2 features like multiplexing, streaming, and connection persistence inherently.