ice VS erpc

We still don't have anything that can do what CORBA could do. gRPC doesn't even come close.

If you are interested in this type of technology, I recommend looking at ZeroC's Ice. https://zeroc.com

It's CORBA with all the warts removed, and a lot of other useful stuff added.

Are you saying: “This solution does not look particularly great”? Well, there's more. The system was not just your average, boring product, it was a modern and fancy distributed system, so it used a framework called Zeroc Ice. This is an RPC framework that also provides deployment configuration, service discovery, SSL encryption and more. By itself it’s rather interesting, but in our case it was used almost everywhere. Majority of the functions in the system were exposed as RPCs, which made them effectively globally visible. And they could call other RPCs and they called even more. And every call produced some side effects that were quite often used in condition expressions of “Algorithms” defined with DSL. These conditions were of course quite heavily nested. As a result, even though we could see in the monitoring interface which steps were already passed, it was almost impossible to tell what would happen next.

What is ICE? In-circuit emulation? RPC framework?

I would love to see the kind of HID solution that you describe paired with a proper strongly typed message format like eRPC. In previous searches for similar messaging, I have also found things like EmbeddedProto and nanopd. I never got to dive into the details on any of these, though.

I've seen people mention Messagepack, Asn.1 and Nanopb, which are data serialization libraries. Since in your example you mention that your protocol is like {START_COMMAND} {MODE_BYTE} {MODE_LENGTH} {MODE_DATA} I suppose that what you want is not only to transmit data, but also commands. I believe that RPC (Remote Procedure Call) is what you're looking for. Unfortunately I haven't found any really mature and well-known RPC frameworks for embedded. There is eRPC, but it is not so actively maintained. The RPC module from Pigweed, a embedded toolkit from Google, looks promising but IMHO it's a work in progress (especially the documentation is quite lacking).