From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:20:11 PDT." References: From: Bakul Shah Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:02:36 -0700 Message-Id: <20090718210237.41EA95B18@mail.bitblocks.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] channels across machines Topicbox-Message-UUID: 26558fe4-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:20:11 PDT Skip Tavakkolian <9nut@9netics.com> wrote: > > Or is there a better idea? This certainly seems preferable > > to RPC or plain byte pipes for communicating structured > > values. > > i have some incomplete ideas that are tangentially related to this -- > more for handling interfaces. > > it seems one could write a compiler that translates an interface > definition (e.g. IDL) into a server and a client library; 9p(2) and > ioproc(2) can be readily used in the generated code to do the tricky > stuff. the main part then becomes how to translate the calls across. I did something like this (map a file of ascii struct defns to C++ classes that included serialization/deserialization) for the only company both of us have worked in! These days I am likely to just use s-exprs if the choice is mine. The joy of sexpr :-) On Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:32:30 CDT Eric Van Hensbergen wrote: > getting a pipe end to something somehow is why you really want to > leverage the namespace as a 9p file system. Indeed but it is a separable concern (just like authentication).