Misc. Improvements and Customizations

[bradhe]

Wanted to see if there's anything you'd like to reintegrate here, and to just get and feedback you might have on approach, etc., with the new features.

I'm mostly interested in seeing the client stuff land as the existing client stuff is a little weak for (real) production use.

Features

1. Connection pooling for RPC clients, making connections between services much more robust.
2. Support for "void" RPC calls

Minor improvements

1. Move everything to new protobuf upstream.

Happy to hear any feedback you might have and to pull out specific pieces. Particularly, the references to my fork (github.com/bradhe/...) could be problematic--if you're in to any of this stuff I'd be happy to issue another commit that reverts it back to mainline.

[kylelemons]

"in the poo"? ;-)

[kylelemons]

Thanks for the interest! To start with, since Google owns this code, you'd need to sign the Google CLA before I can accept your PR. Overall the changes look reasonable, and though I'm a bit skeptical about the atomics and such in the client package, that's not a deal-breaker. I also can't pull it with your fork in the name either. Since I don't actively make use of this and can't really be trusted to do any kind of maintance, I'd also be open to adding you as a contributor to the repo so you don't have to wait crazytimes for me to check my github inbox for your pull requests...