Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I'm trying to implement some fixes for the BigQuery Storage API Write client in googleapis/python-bigquery-storage#278 so that it's easier to use from a multi-threaded environment.
The current interface for bi-directional streaming APIs takes an iterable of requests and returns an iterable of responses. For long-running streams, it's on the consumer of this API to ensure they have a background thread consuming the responses as they write requests to the the input iterable (e.g. via a generator).
It would be preferable if the API instead provided a way to open the stream with an initial request and then subsequently call send/recv on the stream (this it the interface provided by BidiRpc
Better yet, if the API guarantees one response message per request message, then having send return a future object would an even more natural experience. (This is the case for the API which I'm trying to wrap).
Better further still would be that the generated client could handle flow control, heartbeats, and stream resumption as is done manually in Pub/Sub, Pub/Sub Lite, and Firestore.
Describe the solution you'd like
At the very least, automatically wrap Bi-Directional streaming APIs in the BidiRpc class, for a more natural streaming API when working with multiple threads (which you basically have to do unless you somehow interlace iterating over the response iterator while you're generating requests).
Describe alternatives you've considered
Status quo means we basically have to make a manual client whenever an API has a Bi-Directional streaming method.
Additional context
- Firestore: https://github.com/googleapis/python-firestore/blob/e57258c51e4b4aa664cc927454056412756fc7ac/google/cloud/firestore_v1/watch.py
- Pub/Sub: https://github.com/googleapis/python-pubsub/blob/e907f6e05f59f64a3b08df3304e92ec960997be6/google/cloud/pubsub_v1/subscriber/_protocol/streaming_pull_manager.py
- Pub/Sub Lite: https://github.com/googleapis/python-pubsublite/blob/670c4b0e5e5edfa402ab65f455f7cc798d064a77/google/cloud/pubsublite/internal/wire/subscriber_impl.py -- Doesn't actually use the BidiRpc base class because they chose to build an async manual client.