any good and simple RPC library for inter-process calls?
I need to send a (probably one) simple one-way command from client processes to server process with arguments of builtin C++ types (so serialization is pretty simple). C++, Windows XP+.
I'm looking for a library that doesn't require complicated configuration, provides simple interface, doesn't require hours to days of learning and doesn't have commercial usage restrictions. Simple solution for simple problem.
Boost.Interprocess is too low-level for this simple task because doesn't provide RPC interface. Sockets are probably an overkill too because I don't need to communicate between machines. The same about DCOM, CORBA et al. Named pipes? Never used them, any good library over WinAPI? OpenMPI?
Answer
I don't think sockets are really overkill. The alternatives all have their own problems and sockets are far better supported than named pipes, shared memory, etc., because almost everyone is using them. The speed of sockets on local system is probably not an issue.
There's Apache Thrift:
http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/
There are a few RPC implementations wrapped around Google's protobuf library as the marshaling mechanism:
https://github.com/google/protobuf/blob/master/docs/third_party.md#rpc-implementations
There's XML-RPC:
http://xmlrpc-c.sourceforge.net/
If your messages are really simple, I might consider using UDP packets, then there are no connections to manage.