Using an alternative connection channel/transport for GRPC

Question

I currently have a primitive RPC setup relying on JSON transferred over secured sockets, but I would like to switch to gRPC. Unfortunately I also need access to AF_UNIX on windows (Which Microsoft recently started supporting, but gRPC has not implemented).

Since I have an existing working connection (managed with a different library), my preference would be to just use that in conjunction with GRPC to send/receive commands in place of my JSON parsing, but I am struggling to identify the best way to do that.

I have seen Plugging custom transport into gRPC but this question differs in the following ways (As well as my hope for a more recent answer)

1. I am wanting to avoid making changes to the core of gRPC. I'd prefer to extend it if possible from within my library, but the answer here implies adding a new transport to gRPC.If I did need to do this at the transport level, is there a mechanism to register it with gRPC after the core has been built?
2. I am unsure if I need to define this as a full custom transport, since I do already have an existing connection established and ready. I have seen some things that imply I could simply extend Channel, but I might be wrong.
3. I need to be able to support Windows, or at least modern versions of it (Which means that the from_fd options gRPC provides are not available since they are currently only implemented for POSIX)

Has anyone solved similar problems with gRPC?

Answer 1

I may have figured out my own answer. I seem to have been overly focused on gRPC, when the service definition component of Protobuf is not dependent on that.

How can i write my own RPC Implementation for Protocol Buffers utilizing ZeroMQ is very similar to my use case, with https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto#services seeming to resolve my issue (And this also explains why I seem to have been mixing up the different kinds of "Channels" involved

I welcome any improvements/suggestions, and hope that maybe this can be found in future searches by people that had the same confusion.