36 releases
0.19.0 | Oct 16, 2024 |
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0.18.2 | Jul 24, 2024 |
0.18.0 | Oct 30, 2023 |
0.16.1 | Jun 24, 2023 |
0.1.0 | Nov 30, 2015 |
#53 in Encoding
65,485 downloads per month
Used in 49 crates
(31 directly)
1.5MB
49K
SLoC
ipc-channel
📚 Documentation 📚
Overview
ipc-channel
is an implementation of the Rust channel API (a form of communicating sequential processes, CSP) over the native OS abstractions. Under the hood, this API uses Mach ports on the Mac and file descriptor passing over Unix sockets on Linux. The serde
library is used to serialize values for transport over the wire.
As much as possible, ipc-channel
has been designed to be a drop-in replacement for Rust channels. The mapping from the Rust channel APIs to ipc-channel
APIs is as follows:
channel()
→ipc::channel().unwrap()
Sender<T>
→ipc::IpcSender<T>
(requiresT: Serialize
)Receiver<T>
→ipc::IpcReceiver<T>
(requiresT: Deserialize
)
Note that both IpcSender<T>
and IpcReceiver<T>
implement Serialize
and Deserialize
, so you can send IPC channels over IPC channels freely, just as you can with Rust channels.
The easiest way to make your types implement Serialize
and Deserialize
is to use the serde_macros
crate from crates.io as a plugin and then annotate the types you want to send with #[derive(Deserialize, Serialize])
. In many cases, that's all you need to do—the compiler generates all the tedious boilerplate code needed to save and restore instances of your types.
In order to bootstrap an IPC connection across processes, you create an instance of the IpcOneShotServer
type, register a global name, pass that name into the client process (perhaps with an environment variable or command line flag), and connect to the server in the client. See cross_process_embedded_senders()
in test.rs
for an example of how to do this using Unix fork()
to spawn the process.
Major missing features
- Servers only accept one client at a time. This is fine if you simply want to use this API to split your application up into a fixed number of mutually untrusting processes, but it's not suitable for implementing a system service. An API for multiple clients may be added later if demand exists for it.
Dependencies
~1–40MB
~637K SLoC