Cross platform IPC [closed]

I'm looking for suggestions on possible IPC mechanisms that are:

• Cross platform (Win32 and Linux at least)
• Simple to implement in C++ as well as the most common scripting languages (perl, ruby, python, etc).
• Finally, simple to use from a programming point of view!

What my options are? I'm programming under Linux, but I'd like what I write to be portable to other OSes in the future. I've thought about using sockets, named pipes, or something like DBus.

In terms of speed, the best cross-platform IPC mechanism will be pipes. That assumes, however, that you want cross-platform IPC on the same machine. If you want to be able to talk to processes on remote machines, you'll want to look at using sockets instead. Luckily, if you're talking about TCP at least, sockets and pipes behave pretty much the same behavior. While the APIs for setting them up and connecting them are different, they both just act like streams of data.

The difficult part, however, is not the communication channel, but the messages you pass over it. You really want to look at something that will perform verification and parsing for you. I recommend looking at Google's Protocol Buffers. You basically create a spec file that describes the object you want to pass between processes, and there is a compiler that generates code in a number of different languages for reading and writing objects that match the spec. It's much easier (and less bug prone) than trying to come up with a messaging protocol and parser yourself.

For C++, check out Boost IPC.
You can probably create or find some bindings for the scripting languages as well.

Otherwise if it's really important to be able to interface with scripting languages your best bet is simply to use files, pipes or sockets or even a higher level abstraction like HTTP.

Why not D-Bus? It's a very simple message passing system that runs on almost all platforms and is designed for robustness. It's supported by pretty much every scripting language at this point.

http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus

If you want a portable, easy to use, multi-language and LGPLed solution, I would recommend you ZeroMQ:

• Amazingly fast, almost linear scaleable and still simple.
• Suitable for simple and complex systems/architectures.
• Very powerful communication patterns available: REP-REP, PUSH-PULL, PUB-SUB, PAIR-PAIR.
• You can configure the transport protocol to make it more efficient if you are passing messages between threads (inproc://), processes (ipc://) or machines ({tcp|pgm|epgm}://), with a smart option to shave off some part of the protocol overheads in case of connections are running between VMware virtual machines (vmci://).

For serialization I would suggest MessagePack or Protocol Buffers (which other have already mentioned as well), depending on your needs.

You might want to try YAMI , it's very simple yet functional, portable and comes with binding to few languages