any good and simple RPC library for inter-process calls? [closed]

Question

I need to send a (probably one) simple one-way command from client processes to server process with arguments of builtin C++ types (so serialization is pretty simple). C++, Windows XP+.

I'm looking for a library that doesn't require complicated configuration, provides simple interface, doesn't require hours to days of learning and doesn't have commercial usage restrictions. Simple solution for simple problem.

Boost.Interprocess is too low-level for this simple task because doesn't provide RPC interface. Sockets are probably an overkill too because I don't need to communicate between machines. The same about DCOM, CORBA et al. Named pipes? Never used them, any good library over WinAPI? OpenMPI?

Answer 1

I don't think sockets are really overkill. The alternatives all have their own problems and sockets are far better supported than named pipes, shared memory, etc., because almost everyone is using them. The speed of sockets on local system is probably not an issue.

There's Apache Thrift:

http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/

There are a few RPC implementations wrapped around Google's protobuf library as the marshaling mechanism:

https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/docs/third_party.md#rpc-implementations

There's XML-RPC:

http://xmlrpc-c.sourceforge.net/

If your messages are really simple, I might consider using UDP packets, then there are no connections to manage.

Answer 2

You might like ZeroMQ for something like this. Perhaps not as much a complete RPC, as a raw byte messaging framework you could use to make an RPC. It's simple, lightweight and with an impressive performance. You can easilly implement an RPC on top of it. Here's an example server straight from the manual:

//
//  Hello World server in C++
//  Binds REP socket to tcp://*:5555
//  Expects "Hello" from client, replies with "World"
//
#include <zmq.hpp>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main () {
    //  Prepare our context and socket
    zmq::context_t context (1);
    zmq::socket_t socket (context, ZMQ_REP);
    socket.bind ("tcp://*:5555");

    while (true) {
        zmq::message_t request;

        //  Wait for next request from client
        socket.recv (&request);
        printf ("Received Hello");

        //  Do some 'work'
        sleep (1);

        //  Send reply back to client
        zmq::message_t reply (5);
        memcpy ((void *) reply.data (), "World", 5);
        socket.send (reply);
    }
    return 0;
}

This example uses tcp://*.5555, but uses more efficient IPC techniques if you use:

socket.bind("ipc://route.to.ipc");

or even faster inter thread protocol:

socket.bind("inproc://path.for.client.to.connect");