[audio] Netstack.FM Podcast Ep9 – Lucio Franco on Tonic, Tower & Rust Networking

In this episode, of another of week Netstack.FM our guest is Lucio Franco, creator of Tonic and also maintainer of Tokio, Tower, and Hyper.

We explore Lucio’s journey from a early startups, creating Tonic — the Rust implementation of gRPC, built on HTTP/2 and Protobuf, joining Amazon and the open source adventures that continue to follow from that

Lucio walks us through:

• The early tower-grpc days and how they evolved into Tonic
• The motivation behind gRPC’s design and its use of HTTP/2 streams and metadata
• How Tonic integrates tightly with the Tokio ecosystem
• The architecture and role of Tower, and its Finagle-inspired design principles
• Thoughts on the future of Tower and how these libraries might evolve together
• Ongoing collaboration with Google and the Rust community to make Tonic more interoperable and future-ready

If you use Tonic or Tower, this episode offers great context on how these pieces came to be — and where they’re headed next.

🎧 Listen here:

• Spotify
• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts
• RSS

More show notes and links can be found at https://netstack.fm/#episode-9.