Wrapper Interface for Cross Platform IPC

Question

I am new to IPC. I want to use different IPC mechanisms in my project. Depending upon the performance and requirements, I need to change the IPC mechanisms to message queue/shared memory or sockets.

I would like to use common APIs for sending, receiving and initialising the IPC even if the IPC mechanism changes internally.

Does any open source wrapper library or common interface available in C++? Or do I need to develop my own APIs to define this? I would like to refer if any already available interfaces for these.

I am looking something similar below

1. init(arguments);
2. send(arguments);
3. receive(arguments);

and many more

Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

There are many C++ libraries for IPC (asking for libs on SO is off-topic ). I was working with

• boost interprocess
• ZeroMQ
• protobuf - serialization only

and they were quite OK for me. There is no such thing as "unified IPC interface" for C++, you must just think about what you need exactly and design the interface according to your needs. I usually work with something similar to the interface below:

class AbstractIPC
{
public:
  virtual ~AbstractIPC() = default;
  virtual bool open() = 0;
  virtual bool close() = 0;
  virtual int send(const uint8_t* data, size_t, length) = 0;
  virtual int receive(uint8_t* data, size_t, length) = 0;
};

The reason for not using std::vector<uint8_t> or std::string is the compatibility with other components, potentially written in C.

Not super precise answer, but I hope it will give you some insight where to start.