Implementation:Alibaba MNN FlatBuffers IDL Gen gRPC

Knowledge Sources	Alibaba_MNN FlatBuffers
Domains	Serialization, Code_Generation
Last Updated	2026-02-10 12:00 GMT

Overview

gRPC service stub code generator that produces client and server stubs using FlatBuffers as the message format.

Description

idl_gen_grpc.cpp implements the gRPC code generation backend for flatc. When a .fbs schema contains rpc_service declarations, this generator produces gRPC service stubs for the target language (C++, Go, or Java). It delegates the actual language-specific stub emission to the corresponding gRPC generator modules in the grpc/src/compiler/ directory.

Usage

Vendored dependency used internally by MNN for model serialization. Not directly imported by end users.

Code Reference

Source Location

• Repository: Alibaba_MNN
• File: 3rd_party/flatbuffers/src/idl_gen_grpc.cpp
• Lines: 1-371

Signature

namespace flatbuffers {
  bool GenerateGRPC(const Parser &parser,
                    const std::string &path,
                    const std::string &file_name);
}

Import

#include "flatbuffers/idl.h"
// Generator invoked internally by flatc

I/O Contract

Input	Output
Parsed Parser object with rpc_service definitions	gRPC service stub source files in the target language

Usage Examples

// Invoked by flatc:
// flatc --grpc --cpp schema.fbs

// Internally:
flatbuffers::Parser parser;
parser.Parse(schema_with_services);
flatbuffers::GenerateGRPC(parser, output_path, file_name);

Related Pages

• Environment:Alibaba_MNN_CPU_Build_Environment