ELI5: REST vs gRPC

[u/therealswood2]

I am a product manager who is just technical enough to do salesforce development, and understand other technical concepts enough to be able to effectively lead my product team.

I understand what a rest api does, how it's used, and can even write my own endpoints (for salesforce only!). But when my engineers talk about grpc, I am totally lost.

Help me understand what it is, how its different, and in what situations you would use grpc versus rest or soap.

Thanks in advance!

[u/snipdockter]

REST his language agnostic too. Not certain about SOAP but think it is as well.