readme.md

rusty_procedure_call

More or less just a proof of concept for generating async RPC interfaces using Rust's macro system. This is far from production ready and should not be used in a professional manner.

The idea is to make it easier to write RPC interfacing without getting bogged down with working on networking and such.

Built on top of tokio, and uses postcard to serialize/deserialize messages.

The gist of it

This crate provides two things; RpcError, which is simply the error type for the library, and more excitingly the #[rpc] attribute macro.

This macro is applied to an impl block for a type, and will automatically create two things; a serve function which you can pass TcpStreams to, and handles RPC calls, and a <type>Rpc struct. This struct acts as your clients connection point and includes RPC versions of all public self referential functions your impl block contains (i.e pub fn func(&self) etc), wrapped in a Result<T, RpcError> to handle potential failure.

See the example below for a working demonstration.

The future

As said this crate is mostly a proof of concept, and could be improved in a number of ways. Listed here are some things I would like to work on:

Goal	Status
Allow for persistent connections.	⌛
The ability to use something other than postcard, if need be.	❌
Documentation.	❌
Support for generic parameters on the type we are using #[rpc] on (unsure if doable or desirable).
Any kind of built-in security.	❌
Might be outside the scope of this project, but the ability to separate the client code and server code into two separate code bases. This might be beneficial in cases where the client does not need the server code and vise-versa.	❌
Proper macro errors and macro etiquette, still new to making macros.	❌
Currently users have to add tokio and serde as dependencies of their projects, unsure if this is desired.	❌

Probably a lot more outside of these points.

Example

See src/tests/example.rs for actual implementation.

use crate::RpcError;
use rpc_derive::rpc;
use tokio::net::TcpListener;
use std::future::Future;

struct Server {
    value: u128,
}
#[rpc]
impl Server {
    pub fn add_one(&mut self) {
        self.value += 1;
    }

    pub fn get_value(&self) -> u128 {
        self.value
    }
}

async fn server() -> Result<(), RpcError> {
    let listener = TcpListener::bind("127.0.0.1:8080").await?;
    let mut me = Server { value: 0 };

    loop {
        let (mut socket, _) = listener.accept().await?;
        me.serve(&mut socket).await?;
    }
}

fn block_async<T>(v: impl Future<Output = T>) -> T {
    tokio::runtime::Builder::new_current_thread()
        .enable_all()
        .build()
        .expect("Failed building the Runtime")
        .block_on(v)
}

fn main() {
    std::thread::spawn(|| block_async(server()));
    block_async(async {
        // ServerRpc is created automatically by the #[rpc] macro
        let server = ServerRpc::new("127.0.0.1:8080");
        let max = 100;
        for _ in 0..max {
            // Call `add_one` on the server, incrementing it on the server.
            server.add_one().await.expect("failed to contact server");
        }
        // Get the server's value.
        let res = server.get_value().await.expect("failed to contact server");
        assert_eq!(max, res)
    });
}