ice VS SteamLauncher

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 use the SteamLauncher plugin for Launchbox, because Steam is excellent for controller configs, and Retroarch sucks at it.

You could look at using steam api interface IClientShortcuts instead of editing the shortcut file so steam doesnt need to be restarted. You can add/remove nonsteam games instantly etc. For example SteamLauncher plugin (c#) (https://github.com/lahma0/SteamLauncher) for LaunchBox does this. (Do note it does things a bit differently and uses one hidden shortcut for all games but you could create one for each game of course)

However, there is the excellent Big Box plugin SteamLauncher that you may be into. All the benefits of Steam's controller customization and social stuff while using Launchbox's... uh, launcher.