xRPC-rs

High-performance local IPC library for Rust with seamless transport flexibility.

Designed for multi-process applications on the same machine. Start with in-process channels for development, scale to shared memory for production IPC, and extend to TCP for network deployment—all with the same interface. No IDL files, no code generation, just Rust types with serde. Future support for cross-language bindings (Python, Java) is planned.

Status: Very early prototype - It is working but not production-ready.

Architecture

xRPC follows a layered architecture:

Application
    ↓
RpcClient/RpcServer (Layer 3)
    ↓
MessageTransport (Layer 2) with compression
    ↓
Transport (Layer 1) raw bytes with framing
    ↓
Network/IPC

Documentation

• Message Protocol - Binary message format specification

Examples

Byte-level Transports

Layer 1 transports (Channel, TCP, RawTransport, TypedChannel):

cargo run --example byte_transports

MessageTransport with SharedMemory

Local RPC using Message protocol over shared memory:

# Terminal 1: Start server

cargo run --example message_transport_shm -- server


# Terminal 2: Run client

cargo run --example message_transport_shm -- client

RPC Client/Server

High-level RPC client and server with typed handlers:

# Terminal 1: Start server

cargo run --example rpc_client_server -- server


# Terminal 2: Run client

cargo run --example rpc_client_server -- client

Future Plans

Completed

• Add support for streaming & compression on message
• Transport layer abstraction
• Local Channel Transport implementation
• SharedMemory Transport implementation
• Heartbeat abstraction for transport reliability
• RawTransport (skip Message protocol overhead)
• ArcTransport (Arc-based, no serialization)

Refactoring Tasks

• Module reorganization: Split protocol.rs into message module.
• Codec trait abstraction: Decouple serialization format
• Relocate TypedChannel

Planned Features

• Network transports (TCP, Unix socket)
• MessageTransport (Layer 2) - Message-aware transport adapter
• Examples for Transports
• High-level Client/Server architecture (Layer 3)
• Streaming support
• Connection pooling
• Batching support
• Service Discovery & Load Balancing

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.