Interprocess

Interprocess communication toolkit for Rust programs. The crate aims to expose as many platform-specific features as possible while maintaining a uniform interface for all platforms.

Features

• Cross-platform interprocess communication primitives:
  • Unnamed pipes — anonymous file-like objects for communicating privately in one direction, most commonly used to communicate between a child process and its parent
  • Local sockets — similar to TCP sockets, but use filesystem or namespaced paths instead of ports on localhost, depending on the OS, bypassing the network stack entirely; implemented using named pipes on Windows and Unix domain sockets on Unix
• POSIX-specific interprocess communication primitives:
  • FIFO files — special type of file which is similar to unnamed pipes but exists on the filesystem, often referred to as "named pipes" but completely different from Windows named pipes
  • Unix domain sockets — a type of socket which is built around the standard networking APIs but uses filesystem paths instead of ports on localhost, optionally using a spearate namespace on Linux akin to Windows named pipes
  • POSIX signals — used to receive short urgent messages from the OS and other programs, as well as sending those messages (practical usage, other than for compatibility reasons, is strongly discouraged)
• Windows-specific interprocess communication primitives:
  • Named pipes — closely resembles Unix domain sockets, uses a separate namespace instead of on-drive paths
  • C signals — like POSIX signals, but with less signal types and a smaller API (practical usage, other than for compatibility reasons, is strongly discouraged)
• Async support — efficient wrapper around local sockets, Windows named pipes and Ud-sockets for high-performance parallelism, currently only supports the Tokio runtime

Feature gates

• signals, on by default — enables support for POSIX signals and C signals. Pulls in additional dependencies.
• tokio_support, off by default — enables support for Tokio-powered efficient asynchronous IPC. Cannot simply be named tokio because of Cargo limitations.
• nonblocking, on by default — deprecated and will be removed, do not use.

License

This crate, along with all community contributions made to it, is dual-licensed under the terms of either the MIT license or the Apache 2.0 license.