As part of my work at Anthropic, I open sourced two Rust crates that fill a gap in the RPC ecosystem:... Tagged with protobuf, connectrpc, rust, anthropic.

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Anthropic open sourced two Rust crates: buffa, a pure-Rust Protocol Buffers implementation with protobuf editions support and zero-copy message views, and connect-rust, a Tower-based ConnectRPC implementation supporting Connect, gRPC, and gRPC-Web protocols. Buffa generates both owned and view types per message, where view types borrow directly from the wire buffer to avoid allocations — yielding 33% more throughput on decode-heavy workloads with allocator pressure at 3.6% vs 9.6% for tonic+prost. The post covers design decisions including zero-copy OwnedView for async contexts, MessageField and EnumValue ergonomics, no_std support, and security issues that passed conformance testing but were caught in security review (asymmetric client/server size limits, decompression bomb vulnerability in trait defaults, missing TLS handshake timeout, and u64::MAX duration panic). Both crates pass full upstream conformance suites and are already in production at Anthropic.

Zero-copy protobuf and ConnectRPC for Rust