Cap'n Proto VS twirp

Yeah I pretty much only use my own alternate container implementations (from KJ[0]), which avoid these footguns, but the result is everyone complains our project is written in Kenton-Language rather than C++ and there's no Stack Overflow for it and we can't hire engineers who know how to write it... oops.

[0] https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/v2/kjdoc/tour.md

- may massively reduce the latency involved.

Those sharing Cap'n Proto-encoded data may have particular interest. Cap'n Proto (https://capnproto.org) is fantastic at its core task - in-place serialization with zero-copy - and we wanted to make the IPC (inter-process communication) involving capnp-serialized messages be zero-copy, end-to-end.

That said, we paid equal attention to other varieties of payload; it's not limited to capnp-encoded messages. For example there is painless (<-- I hope!) zero-copy transmission of arbitrary combinations of STL-compliant native C++ data structures.

To help determine whether Flow-IPC is relevant to you we wrote an intro blog post. It works through an example, summarizes the available features, and has some performance results. https://www.linode.com/blog/open-source/flow-ipc-introductio...

Of course there's nothing wrong with going straight to the GitHub link and getting into the README and docs.

Currently Flow-IPC is for Linux. (macOS/ARM64 and Windows support could follow soon, depending on demand/contributions.)

FWIW, my C++ toolkit library, KJ, does the same thing.[0]

But presumably you could still write a condition predicate which looks at things which aren't actually part of the mutex-wrapped structure? Or does is the Rust type system able to enforce that the callback can only consider the mutex-wrapped value and values that are constant over the lifetime of the wait? (You need the latter e.g. if you are waiting for the mutex-wrapped value to compare equal to some local variable...)

[0] https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/e6ad6f919aeb381b...

The second one is to encode data in such a way that you can read it and operate on it directly from the buffer. You write data in a layout that is the same, or easily transformed as types in memory. To do that you usually need to encode with a known schema, only Sized types to efficiently compute fields locations as offsets in the buffer, and you usually represent pointers as offset into the encode. You can look at capnproto protocol for instance https://capnproto.org/

Worked well for Cap'n Proto (the cerealization protocol)! https://capnproto.org/

With all due respect, you read completely wrong.

* The very first use case for which Cap'n Proto was designed was to be the protocol that Sandstorm.io used to talk between sandbox and supervisor -- an explicitly adversarial security scenario.

* The documentation explicitly calls out how implementations should manage resource exhaustion problems like deep recursion depth (stack overflow risk).

* The implementation has been fuzz-tested multiple ways, including as part of Google's oss-fuzz.

* When there are security bugs, I issue advisories like this:

https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/tree/v2/security-advi...

* The primary aim of the entire project is to be a Capability-Based Security RPC protocol.

I like how they use capability-based security [0] and use Cap'n Proto protocol. This is another technology that is slow to get broad adoption, but has many things going for when compared to e.g. Protocol Buffers (Cap'n Proto is created by the primary author of Protobuf v2, Kenton Varda).

[0] https://sandstorm.io/how-it-works#capabilities

[1] https://capnproto.org

Related but not Rust-specific: FlatBuffers, Cap'n Proto.

The next time I want to build an API, I will probably make use of https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp. I like working with Protobuf and having strongly-typed and well-defined messages, but gRPC is way, way too much. It's obviously a Google product, built for what Google needs.

Use Protobuf for messages, but just use HTTP for transport.

- Twirp (Twitch light version of gRPC, with optional JSON encoding, HTTP1 support and without streaming) - https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp

There is another: twirp

And addition to what was mentioned there are also webrpc and twirp.

If you find one, you maybe also interested in twirp.

Twitch has a great framework for it https://twitchtv.github.io/twirp/docs/intro.html

We have better experience with https://goa.design/ than with https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp

Take a look at Twirp (https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp) open sourced by TwitchTv. It's a lot lighter weight than gRPC. It does use Protobufs but addresses some of the concerns you mentioned, such as being able to test with JSON payloads, works over HTTP 1.1 and HTTP/2, good client libraries, and doesn't require a proxy.

They address your concerns in more detail in the Twirp release announcement (2018) - https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2018/01/16/twirp-a-sweet-new-rpc-f...