CODEWITHSUNDEEP
clinuxwindowsrpc
steve cook
steve cook

Reputation: 3214

C cross-platform RPC that requires minimal boilerplate?

I have an existing library in C, which I want to be able to allow remote access to (either from Linux or Windows).

I looked at the usual RPC suspects like Thrift and Protobuf, but neither of these deal cleanly with C-style function calls (things like pass-by-ref, char* instead of string, * instead of List<> etc).

In short, to use either of these it looks like I would need to write a complete IDL from scratch, and add a lot of boilerplate code to transfer C-style function calls into these environments.

Are there any RPC libraries around that

Upvotes: 0

Views: 527

Answers (1)

janneb
janneb

Reputation: 37208

Well, there's protobuf-c, an implementation of protobuf in C.

And then there's the classical XDR, found on most/(all?) unix-like systems, versions exist for windows as well. See also the Linux xdr(3) man page which contains an overview of the API.

Note that both protobuf and XDR are serialization libraries, they don't provide RPC. The "companion RPC library" to XDR is called, well, RPC, but I don't think anyone writes new code with that, and AFAICS it's unix-specific (portmap doesn't run on windows, does it? And it's generally a bad idea anyway.). Then there's protobuf-c-rpc which is the C version of the protobuf RPC library; probably a better bet than classic RPC.

Upvotes: 1

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