README.md

Inter-Process Communication

Wikipedia

Approaches:

• Files
• Signals
• Sockets
  • TCP/IP
• Unix domain sockets
• Message queues
• Pipes
  • Anonymous pipes
  • Named pipes
• Shared memory
• Message passing
  • Remote procedure calls
• Memory-mapped files
• Windows: Local Inter-Process Communication (LPC/ALPC)

IPC-Bench: 🐎 Benchmarks for Inter-Process-Communication Techniques

Memory-mapped files

• cloudflare/mmap-sync: Rust library for concurrent data access, using memory-mapped files, zero-copy deserialization, and wait-free synchronization.

  Every request, every microsecond: scalable machine learning at Cloudflare

  A read operation through the Synchronizer performs zero-copy deserialization and returns a "guarded" Result encapsulating a reference to the Rust struct using RAII design pattern. This operation also increments the atomic counter of active readers using the struct. Once the Result is out of scope, the Synchronizer decrements the number of readers.

  Linux, Windows.

Shared memory

• Eclipse iceoryx: True zero-copy inter-process-communication

  vcpkg

  Rust: iceoryx-rs

  • Eclipse iceoryx2

C/C++:

• eCAL: enhanced Communication Abstraction Layer. A high performance publish-subscribe, client-server cross-plattform middleware.

  vcpkg

• Shadesmar: Fast C++ IPC using shared memory (r/cpp)

• Flow-IPC: Modern C++ toolkit for high-speed inter-process communication (IPC)

• AlephZero

• mutouyun/cpp-ipc: C++ IPC Library: A high-performance inter-process communication using shared memory on Linux/Windows.

  vcpkg

• microsoft/IPC: IPC is a C++ library that provides inter-process communication using shared memory on Windows. A .NET wrapper is available which allows interaction with C++ as well. (discontinued)

Rust:

• shmem-ipc

No messages:

• shared_memory: A Rust wrapper around native shared memory for Linux and Windows

• boostorg/interprocess: Boost.org interprocess module

  Sharing memory between processes

Applications:

• Sensor data

  很多传感器的驱动是 C++ 写的，对 C++ 的支持比较重要。

Pipes

Rust:

• std::process::Stdio
• os_pipe.rs: a cross-platform library for opening OS pipes in Rust
• tokio::net
• Hyper-named-pipe: Exposes a HTTP interface over Tokio's Named Pipes implementation through a Hyper Connection interface.

Unix domain sockets

Wikipedia

Windows starts to support Unix domain sockets from Windows 17063, released on 2018-04-10. See AF_UNIX comes to Windows - Windows Command Line for details.

Message queues

• ZeroMQ (GitHub)
• nanomsg (GitHub)
• NNG (GitHub)
• Zenoh: zenoh unifies data in motion, data in-use, data at rest and computations. It carefully blends traditional pub/sub with geo-distributed storages, queries and computations, while retaining a level of time and space efficiency that is well beyond any of the mainstream stacks.

  • TCP/UDP/QUIC/HTTP, shared memory

  • DORA: DORA (Dataflow-Oriented Robotic Architecture) is middleware designed to streamline and simplify the creation of AI-based robotic applications. It offers low latency, composable, and distributed dataflow capabilities. Applications are modeled as directed graphs, also referred to as pipelines.

    Communication between nodes is handled with shared memory on a same machine and TCP on distributed machines. Our shared memory implementation tracks messages across processes and discards them when obsolete. Shared memory slots are cached to avoid new memory allocation.

Differences between nanomsg and ZeroMQ

Languages

Rust

• →gRPC

• ZeroMQ

  • rust-zmq: Rust zeromq bindings.
  • zmq.rs: A native implementation of ØMQ in Rust

• nanomsg

  • nng-rs
  • runng
  • nanomsg.rs: Nanomsg library for Rust (discontinued)

• Eclipse iceoryx2: True zero-copy inter-process-communication in pure Rust (Website, Docs.rs)

  • Shared memory
  • Cycle time
  • Languages: Rust, C/C++
    • Can I use cpp programmer as a publisher and rust program as a subscriber? - Discussion #480
      • Apart from the memory layout, iceoryx2 also requires the type name to be the same. - Issue #481
  • is_compatible_to()
  • 32-bit
    • Introduce atomic type for iceoryx - Issue #200
    • Cannot build for target i686-pc-windows-msvc - Issue #235
    • Fully support C and C++ Bindings on 32 Bit Architectures - Issue #262
    • Cross 32/64-bit communication?
      • Interoperability between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. - Issue #402

  gantt
      title Latency (in ns) - 64b payload
      dateFormat X
      axisFormat %s
  
      section iceoryx2
      240 : 0, 240
      section iceoryx
      1000 : 0, 1000
      section MQueue
      700 : 0, 700
      section UDS
      1500 : 0, 1500
  

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  gantt
      title Latency (in ns) - 64kb payload
      dateFormat X
      axisFormat %s
  
      section iceoryx2
      240 : 0, 240
      section iceoryx
      1000 : 0, 1000
      section MQueue
      14000 : 0, 14000
      section UDS
      23000 : 0, 23000
  

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• servo/ipc-channel: A multiprocess drop-in replacement for Rust channels

  • OS

    • Unix: Unix domain sockets
    • Windows: named pipes
      • Use ALPC on Windows - Issue #211

    How about using shared-memory to implement ipc-channel. - Issue #128

  • Channel between 64-bit and 32-bit process - Issue #304

    • YaLTeR/ipc-channel at 64-to-32-bits

  • ipc-rpc

• Interprocess: Multifunctional cross-platform interprocess communication toolkit for Rust.

  • Unix: Unix domain sockets, FIFO files, unnamed pipes.
  • Windows: named pipes, unnamed pipes.

• shmem-ipc: Untrusted IPC with maximum performance and minimum latency. On Rust, on Linux.

  Linux: Shared memory

• BUS/RT: Modern, fast, Rust-native IPC broker

  Unix domain sockets, TCP sockets.

• rs-ipc: A rust library for interprocess communication (discontinued)