Recommended way of IPC in Rust

help
1

I am building a server application (targeting Unix-like systems) that will receive payloads from clients only on the same machine. Clients will send a request and get a response back with possibility of sending a subsequent request based on what server responded.

What's the best/recommended mechanism to do this? I have been playing around with Unix-domain sockets but I have seen projects that actually use a local web server to receive http requests.
If I am not mistaking, racer uses stdin/command line arguments to achieve something similar.

In my case speed & latency are important so that's why I've been tinkering with sockets.

What's your preferred way of doing this in you Rust projects?

2 Likes
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There is some community around GRPC in rust for IPC. Beware that some of them are nightly only.
https://crates.io/search?q=grpc

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I have used Unix pipes for this purpose. If your server starts the clients, it can hand each one an anonymous pipe. Otherwise, you can use named pipes.

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yea, have to used named pipes since server cant do that.
have you been able to run a Rust program in background as a daemon and when another application tries to launch it again we just send the input arguments to the background process and force it to process them instead of relaunching a new copy of it?

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I've had a lot of success with using named pipes and bincode.

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Here's an example of using bincode and named pipes: Playground.

6 Likes
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oh, that's a pretty complete example. Thank you!

Have you had any issues with names pipes? how's the performance?

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FWIW, I think making a crate out of that would be useful. Bonus points if It transparently supports named pipes on windows.

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In Habitat, we use GitHub - habitat-sh/ipc-channel: A multiprocess drop-in replacement for Rust channels, which is a fork of https://github.com/servo/ipc-channel (because we need a particular branch with windows support which has never made it back into master). If you only need unix support, you should be able to use the servo crate directly.

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